Hunt Slonem Queen Elizabeth

Hunt Slonem has mastered the art of repetition in his exuberant Neo-Expressionist paintings. Some of his favorite subjects are bunnies, butterflies and the tropical birds that live in the private aviary nestled within his 30,000-square-foot studio complex in Brooklyn, New York.

“I believe in repetition like a holy mantra or rosary,” Slonem told Introspective, referring to his artistic method. “I am slightly influenced by Pop art, like the repetition of soup cans, postage stamps and celebrities. It’s something I have been doing my whole life.”

Slonem’s depictions of birds — which are often rendered in thick, gestural brushstrokes and arranged in a loose grid — owe to a fascination with tropical avian life that he developed during a childhood spent in Hawaii and Nicaragua. Today, along with the aviary, his studio contains a personal garden, a collection of antiques and walls and walls of artworks.

“I am a collector of things. My primary focus is color and objects. I love to make them work in a space,” Slonem says. “Sometimes I define a space with color.”

Besides birds, Slonem has painted so many bunnies that they’ve become a signature. Limned in expressive, urgent strokes on flat, vibrantly colored backgrounds, these creatures fascinate through their subtle variations. “I have painted hundreds of rabbits, but each one is different,” the artist has explained. “Each has its own personality, and it just comes through me.”

The multitalented Slonem also sculpts, makes prints, creates installations and restores historic spaces. His work has achieved cult status among collectors and is represented in the permanent collections of such esteemed institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Slonem has even made an appearance on Real Housewives of New York.

Find original Hunt Slonem paintings, prints and other art for sale on 1stDibs.

An elegant and sophisticated decorative touch in any living space, portrait paintings have remained popular throughout the years and are widely loved pieces of art for display in many homes today.

Portrait paintings are at least as old as ancient Egypt, where realistic, lifelike depictions of the recently deceased — commonly known as “mummy portraits” — were painted on wooden panels and affixed to mummies as part of the burial tradition.

For centuries, painters have used portraiture as a means of expressing a subject’s nobility, societal status and authority. Portraits were given as gifts in Renaissance Europe, and a portrait artist might have been commissioned to help mark a significant occasion such as a wedding or a promotion to high office. Prior to the advent of photography, which eventually replaced painted portraits as a quicker and more efficient way of capturing a person’s essence, the subject of a portrait had to sit for hours until the painter had finished. And during the 18th century in particular, if an artist commissioned for a portrait struggled with how to adequately memorialize and capture a subject’s likeness, sometimes a portrait painting wasn’t completed for up to a year.

Whether it’s part of the gallery-style approach to your living-room or dining-room walls or merely inspiration as you devise an eye-grabbing color scheme in your home, a portrait painting is a timeless decorative object for any interior. A landscape painting or sculpture might give you the kind of insight into a specific region of the world or a different culture that you can ascertain only through art. Similarly, when you take the time to learn about the subject of a portrait painting that you bring into your home — the sitter’s history, the relationship between the sitter and the artist should one exist, the story of how the portrait came to be — that work can become intensely personal in addition to its place as an object for an art-hungry corner of your apartment or house.

On 1stDibs, visit a vast collection of famous portrait paintings or works by emerging artists. Search by medium to find the right portrait paintings for your home in oil paint, synthetic resin paint and more. Find portrait paintings in a variety of styles, too, including contemporary, Impressionist and Pop art, or search by artist to find unique works created by painters such as Mark Beard, Steve Kaufman and Montse Valdés.