There is always someone who tells you.
When your children are small, a woman in the grocery store will watch you push them through Publix with cookies in their hands and chocolate smeared across their faces, and she’ll smile at you in that knowing way. “It goes so fast,” she’ll say. A woman at the library will tell you. A teacher will tell you. Mothers whose children are already grown will tell you with such certainty that you believe them, but you don’t really understand what they’re saying.
Not yet.
Because when you’re in the middle of childhood, it doesn’t always feel fast. There are lunches to pack and clothes to wash and shoes that can’t be found when you’re already late. There are school projects, birthday parties, fevers, practices, bedtime negotiations and a thousand ordinary Tuesdays.
Childhood feels enormous when you’re standing inside it.
Then one day, it doesn’t.
My daughter Sara is a senior this year. I am incredibly proud of the young woman she has become, and I also find myself grieving a season that hasn’t even ended yet. She’s still under my roof, but I can already feel the edges of our life changing. If I’ve done my job well, she will leave me. She’ll build a life that belongs to her. That is exactly what I have raised her to do.
It doesn’t make the leaving easier.
I look at photographs of my girls when they were little now and notice things I had forgotten. The roundness of a cheek. The way one of them smiled before her face changed. A dress I hadn’t thought about in years. The little hands that once reached for mine without thinking.
So when mothers ask me, “What is the best age to have a painted portrait made of my child?” I could give them a list. Six months is beautiful. One year. Three, five, seven, ten, thirteen, sixteen, eighteen, twenty-one. There are ages that naturally feel like milestones.
But that isn’t really my answer anymore.
My answer is yesterday. Because today, they’ve already changed.
A Mother Who Wanted to Remember the Freckles
When Aereal Runyans of Mountain Brook applied for my Spring Heirloom Portrait Collection, she didn’t send me some elaborate story about why her family should be chosen. She told me about her children, Coleman and Callaway, and then she told me something only a mother would think to mention.
“They both have the best freckles along their noses and cheeks,” she wrote, “and I’d love to have that captured in a painting.”
That stayed with me.
She was right to ask. According to the Cleveland Clinic, childhood freckles tend to darken in summer, lighten in winter and fade with age. The exact constellation across Callaway’s nose at four won’t be there at fourteen. Aereal knew that without being told.
At the time of their portrait session, Coleman was six and Callaway was four. Since then, both have had birthdays. Callaway celebrated hers with a party and a brand-new pair of pierced ears, and today they are seven and five. Those numbers don’t sound dramatically different until you’ve raised children yourself. Then you know how much can happen between four and five. A face changes. A body stretches. A voice becomes a little less babyish. The things they love change. Their confidence changes. They start to look, almost imperceptibly, like the person they’re becoming.
Aereal was already feeling that familiar contradiction of motherhood: tremendous pride in watching your children grow and the strange ache of wishing you could slow it down.
She was also worried about the portrait session.
Like a lot of mothers, she wasn’t entirely convinced her children would cooperate. She had even created a reward system for good listening and following directions. She had prepared for the possibility that the day might not go exactly as planned.
What happened instead was much more interesting.
The Moment In Between
Coleman was inquisitive and engaging from the beginning. I photographed him first while Aereal and Callaway were in my glam room with celebrity makeup artist Melissa Bogardus, known to many of her clients as Makeup Mel. That’s how I plan a family day. Nobody is waiting around bored, and everyone walks onto the set feeling their best.
Coleman wore a navy blazer and leaned against a carved walnut chair in front of a hand-painted canvas backdrop by David Maheu, a now-retired painter whose backdrops are still legendary among portrait artists. I gave him enough direction to get him started and then, as I usually do with children, I stopped trying to pose every inch of him.
Children generally know how to be themselves until adults interfere too much.
I prefer to give them a place to begin and then watch where their bodies naturally settle. I talk to them. I ask them questions about their lives: what they love at school, who their best friend is, what their sister does that makes them laugh. Their faces light up while they answer, and I wait for what comes after, when they have forgotten for half a second that there’s a camera in front of them.
That is the moment I’m always looking for.
Not the biggest smile. Not the most technically perfect pose. The moment in between, when a child relaxes enough to be seen.
When Callaway joined him, the session shifted again. She wore a pale blue heirloom dress trimmed in lace from Born Children’s Boutique in Auburn, the kind of classic children’s clothing that won’t look dated in thirty years. The two of them climbed into the chairs together, squeezed close, rested against one another and laughed.
There is something almost musical about the sound of siblings giggling together when you’re their mother. You know, of course, that they also fight and annoy each other and invade each other’s space. But then there are these flashes of tenderness that reveal the bond underneath all of it.
Those are the pieces of a family that deserve to be remembered too.
The First Frame
Later in the day, I changed the mood completely.
There is a south-facing window in my studio with a covered balcony outside it. The balcony softens the direct light before it enters the room, and on the right day it creates the sort of directional window light that has fascinated painters for centuries. I love the way it shapes a face without announcing itself, and I often think about the light in the paintings of Johannes Vermeer and the Old Masters when I work there.
For Callaway, now in a soft pink dress by Hannah Kate, a children’s clothing line founded and designed right here in Homewood, I brought a pink and gilded French cane chair close to the window and asked her to climb into it.
That was almost all the posing I gave her.
She settled into the chair, barefoot, and looked toward me with this wonderful seriousness that belonged entirely to her.
The very first frame was the portrait.
There are photographs you labor toward, making tiny adjustments until everything comes together, and then there are photographs that simply arrive. This one arrived. It’s the portrait at the top of this page, and it remains one of the children’s portraits I am proudest to have created because I didn’t manufacture something for her. I gave her the setting, the light and the room to be herself.
That is also why I love using photographs as the foundation for painted portraiture. The painting can have the presence and permanence of a traditional work of art without losing the peculiar little truths that make a child recognizable to the people who love them.
My painted portraits are built from the photography and finished in oil by hand. The goal isn’t to turn a child into someone grander or more polished than they really are. The goal is to elevate what is already there until a fleeting moment of childhood can hold its own on a wall for generations.
The Photograph Her Daughter Will Understand Differently Someday
Aereal joined Callaway by the window wearing a pink tulle gown I pulled from my client wardrobe. I styled Aereal in every look that day, and for this one I wanted mother and daughter to feel like they belonged to the same soft, rosy world. We photographed the two of them against a hand-painted Oliphant Studio backdrop, and among those images is one of them close together, nose to nose, Aereal’s hand cradling a freckled cheek.
Aereal chose that photograph as her complimentary fine art matted print.
I understand why.
Right now, Callaway can look at that photograph and see herself with her mother. Someday she will see something else.
She’ll see how young her mother was.
She’ll notice the way Aereal looked at her. She may remember the feeling of being held. She may have children of her own by then and suddenly understand something about the woman on the other side of that little girl’s face.
Portraits change as we age.
The photograph doesn’t move, but we do.
A picture that belongs to the mother when the child is five may belong just as much to the daughter when she is forty.
One of my favorite portraits from the session carries that same idea in a different way. Aereal is seated in a white blouse and a cloud of champagne tulle with both children gathered beneath her arms, Coleman tucked into a gilded cane chair on one side and Callaway leaning into her on the other. When I looked at it afterward, I thought immediately of a mother bird sheltering her babies beneath her wings. There is protection in the composition, but there is also something temporary about it. You know instinctively that the children won’t always fit there.
Maybe that’s why I love it.
One Last Portrait of the Family They Were
The week before our session, Aereal learned that she was pregnant with their third child.
We hadn’t planned the session around that news. It simply became part of the story.
Suddenly the photographs weren’t only preserving Coleman at six and Callaway at four. They were also preserving one of the final chapters in which this family existed exactly as it did then, mother and son and daughter, just before another baby arrived and rearranged all of their lives.
There is rarely a trumpet announcing those thresholds while we’re living them.
You don’t always know that this is the last summer your child will look like this. The last Christmas before someone loses both front teeth. The last year a son will curl easily into his mother’s lap. The last portrait before a new baby joins the family.
Life doesn’t tell us which ordinary moments will later become precious.
That is why I am increasingly resistant to the idea of waiting for the “right” age.
And Then We Let Her Be Four
Not every image from the Runyans session was intended to feel timeless or formal. Some were created precisely because childhood is playful and specific.
Aereal had imagined photographing Callaway in her dance leotard with her hair in pin curls, leaning into all the girlish things she loved at that age. I took the idea a little further and created an entire princess tea party around her.
There was a vintage floral tea set, rhinestone jewelry, a jeweled crown, a little makeup compact and sparkling dress-up heels. Callaway poured tea and played pretend. She tried on beautiful things and became absorbed in the little world we had created for her.
I love those photographs for a completely different reason than I love the portrait beside the window.
They aren’t trying to make four years old look sophisticated.
They let four years old be four.
The dance clothes, the pin curls, the tea set, the costume jewelry, the fascination with things that sparkle. Those details may seem small now. Years from now, they’re exactly the details that may make Aereal’s heart catch.
We eventually ended the session in white T-shirts and blue jeans against the same hand-painted Oliphant backdrop. By then we had moved from formal portraiture to sibling photographs, from mother and children to dress-up and back again. What resulted wasn’t one interpretation of the Runyans family. It was a collection of who they were in that particular season.
When Aereal wrote about the day afterward, this is what she said:
“Breanne has such a gift, not just behind the camera, but in how she makes you feel. She was so patient and natural with my kids… You can tell she truly sees her work as creating art, not just taking pictures.” Aereal Runyans, Mountain Brook
They Didn’t Choose a Painting
There is another part of this story that matters to me because I think it says something important about commissioning portraiture.
The Runyans family did not ultimately commission a painting from this session.
They had been awarded a $1,000 credit toward a qualifying painted portrait as part of the Spring Heirloom Portrait Collection, but when Aereal saw the finished photographs, she fell in love with so many of them that she chose to put her investment toward heirloom photographs for their home instead.
She selected individual portraits of Coleman and Callaway along with a sibling composition that will be produced as a 36×24 giclée canvas, and she selected framing through my studio as well.
I love that choice for them.
My job isn’t to force every family toward the same piece of artwork. It’s to create work worthy of living in their home and then help them decide which form tells their story best. For some families that will be a large heirloom painted portrait, created from the photography and finished in oil by hand. For others it will be a collection of heirloom family photography that already possesses the painterly feeling they were drawn to in the first place. If you’re weighing the two, I’ve written about what to look for in an oil portrait artist in Birmingham.
The medium can change.
The reason for doing it doesn’t.
So, What Is the Best Age?
If you are the sort of person who wants the practical answer, there are ages I particularly love. Six months has the sweetness of babyhood. One marks an obvious threshold. Three still carries the softness of toddlerhood. Five, seven and ten each seem to capture a distinct version of childhood. Thirteen begins another chapter entirely. Sixteen, eighteen and twenty-one mark the gradual transition into adulthood. You can see children at many of these ages in my children’s heirloom portraits.
But none of those ages is more important than the child you have now.
If your son is eight and you never commissioned the portrait when he was five, you haven’t missed it.
If your daughter is eleven and you wish you had done it when she still had her baby teeth, you haven’t missed it.
If your child is seventeen and suddenly you’re wondering how you got here, you haven’t missed it.
Better late than never.
Because I don’t think the purpose of a portrait is to prove that you caught childhood at its most picturesque stage. I think the purpose is to say: this version of you mattered enough to remember.
That is what I understand differently now as a mother nearing an empty nest.
I can’t have Sara at four again. I can’t go back and take more photographs of every ordinary day I didn’t realize I would miss. There are things about my daughters’ childhoods I thought I would remember forever that have already begun to soften around the edges.
I can’t stop that.
What I can do is make sure the things we chose to preserve remain.
And perhaps that is why painted portraits have survived for centuries. Long before any of us had a camera in our pockets, families understood the human urge to leave something behind. We can walk through the Birmingham Museum of Art today, look into the face of a child painted generations ago, and know that at some point someone loved that face enough to say, Remember this.
This version of you mattered enough to remember.
The Fall Heirloom Portrait Collection
This fall, I’m choosing four families for my Fall Heirloom Portrait Collection at my studio in Trussville, Alabama.
Each selected family will receive a complimentary portrait sitting valued at $1,700, a complimentary fine art matted print valued at $500, and a $1,000 credit toward a hand-painted oil portrait measuring 28×36 or larger. There is a $250 reservation fee to secure the session date, and that amount is credited toward the family’s order.
Applications are open through October 31, but I review them as they arrive rather than waiting until the deadline. If I read an application and immediately feel that I want to create something for that family, I’ll call them. We’ll talk about your family and make sure we’re a good fit, and I’ll walk you through the full portrait experience from that first conversation to the day your art is hung. Because I call as I go, the four available spaces may be awarded before October 31.
You don’t have to live in Birmingham to be considered. Families from Mountain Brook, Homewood, Vestavia Hills, Hoover and Trussville are welcome, and so are families willing to travel from Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, Auburn, Mobile, Fairhope, Daphne, Dothan, and from Mississippi, Georgia and Tennessee.
Fall is when most families start thinking about portraits, usually outdoors among the leaves. I’ve written about why the best place for fall family photos in Birmingham isn’t outside, and a fall session also sets up a lovely holiday gift. A hand-painted portrait takes time and won’t be finished by Christmas, but photographic portraits can be, and I can create a gift certificate or a matted print replica to open on Christmas morning. The finished painting follows in time for Mother’s Day.
I’d especially love to hear from families applying for someone else. Maybe your own mother has always wanted a portrait of her grandchildren over the mantel. Maybe you grew up with a painting like that in your family home, or maybe you never had one at all.
The application isn’t complicated. I want to know who you would love to have painted, why this season of their life matters to you, and whether you’re local or willing to travel.
You don’t need to write the perfect thing.
Aereal didn’t.
She told me about two children with freckles across their noses.
That was enough.
Apply for the Fall Heirloom Portrait Collection or call the studio at 205-537-2939.
Frequently Asked Questions
There are wonderful milestone ages for children’s portraits, including six months, one, three, five, seven, ten, thirteen, sixteen, eighteen and twenty-one. But there isn’t one age that is objectively best. Children change constantly, and if preserving this particular season matters to you, I would rather see you create the portrait now than wait for an age that sounds more significant on paper.
Painted portraits begin at $6,500 for approximately a 20×24 portrait. A 28×36 painted portrait begins at $8,500, with the final investment depending on the commission. The $1,000 credit included with the Fall Heirloom Portrait Collection applies to painted portraits measuring 28×36 or larger.
Four selected families will receive a complimentary portrait sitting valued at $1,700, a complimentary fine art matted print valued at $500 and a $1,000 credit toward a qualifying hand-painted oil portrait. A $250 reservation fee secures the session date and is credited toward the family’s order.
No. Families outside the Birmingham area are welcome to apply. If selected, you would need to travel to the Breanne Fine Portraiture studio in Trussville, Alabama for your session.
A hand-painted portrait created from a fall session cannot be completed in time for Christmas. Photographic portraits can be completed by Christmas, however, and families who wish to give a painted portrait commission as a Christmas gift can present a gift certificate or matted print replica. The finished painting can be delivered in time for Mother’s Day.
Breanne Fine Portraiture | Hand-painted heirloom portraits and fine art portrait photography | Trussville, Alabama | Serving Birmingham, Mountain Brook, Vestavia Hills, Homewood, Hoover, Trussville, Huntsville, Tuscaloosa, Montgomery, Auburn, Mobile, Fairhope, Daphne, Dothan, and families across Mississippi, Georgia, and Tennessee
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