Charles Cecil

Charles Cecil was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1945 and raised in Winnetka, Illinois. He graduated from Haverford College with degrees in art history and classical studies. After attending Yale University Graduate School, Cecil was awarded an Elizabeth T. Greenshields Foundation grant and used it to study with the classical realist painters R. H. Ives Gammell in Boston and Richard F. Lack in Minneapolis. Cecil then painted landscapes in Europe through the support of a John F. and Anna Lee Stacey Scholarship Fund grant.

In Florence, Cecil and Daniel Graves founded Studio Cecil-Graves to educate young painters in classical drawing and oil painting. In 1991, Cecil established Charles H. Cecil Studios. The training methods of Cecil can be traced back to the Old Master ateliers that flourished throughout Europe from the Renaissance until the end of the nineteenth century and ultimately to the treatises by Alberti, Leonardo, and Roger de Piles. The hallmarks of Cecil’s work and the principles of his school are a respect for aesthetic beauty and the representational arts that have been the basis of classical and Western European culture for millennia.

Charles H. Cecil is a distinguished portraitist, a painter of landscapes and large-scale religious works, and a sculptor. He has received numerous awards from the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1979, Cecil won the Hallgarten First Prize for oil painting, and in 1980, he won the Altman Second Prize for landscape painting. He was also featured in the 2006 exhibition “Slow Painting: A Deliberate Renaissance” at Oglethorpe University Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia. In April 2008, Cecil received an award from the National Portrait Society of America for “Excellence in Art Education.” Cecil’s works are found in the permanent collections of the American Philosophical Society and Jefferson Medical School in Philadelphia.