Michelle Obama's portrait painted by Glen Cove native Sharon Sprung

Portrait painter Sharon Sprung’s road to the White House began with a difficult childhood in Glen Cove that taught her to look beneath the surface to reveal people’s character.  

Last month, Sprung’s portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the White House. Obama noted that Sprung was joining a small group of women who have painted some of the official portraits that hang throughout the famous address.

“I’m thrilled that this extraordinary work is going to be enshrined forever as part of our nation’s history,” Obama said during the Sept. 7 unveiling, standing beside her husband, former President Barack Obama. Speaking directly to Sprung, she said they connected through “your essence, your soul, the way you saw me, the way we interacted.”

Dorothy Moss, curator of painting and sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., where another image of Obama — painted by a different artist — hangs, said she has followed Sprung’s career for years.

“She’s got a signature style that separates her,” Moss said. “I love the way that her work is both contemporary and highly academic.”

Sprung’s work combines a tradition of 17th- and 18th-century portraiture with flat backgrounds and vibrant color palettes that make them feel of this moment, Moss said.

“What makes painted portraiture successful is when there’s a connection between the artist and the subject so that there’s a psychological experience that comes through to the viewer,” Moss said. “And Sharon Sprung clearly gets to know her subjects.”

‘I always loved painting’

Sprung, 69, lives in her Brooklyn studio but grew up on Milford Lane in Glen Cove. She called her home a “Levittown” house differentiated from its neighbors by the color of its paint.

“When I was younger, I enjoyed with my friends sort of wandering into the [Gold Coast] estates and playing there, unknown and unseen, because they were so beautiful,” Sprung said of the mansions on the North Shore. “We saw it as a fairytale land that we could act out little fantasies that girls, young girls do.”

Soon after she was born in Brooklyn, Sprung’s family moved to Glen Cove, but her father’s death when she was 6 left her mother to raise two young children alone.

“I think she felt cheated and missed out on things,” Sprung said. Her mother was a counselor at Glen Cove High School and wanted her to pursue more practical subjects than art.

“She had expectations of me that I couldn’t follow,” Sprung said. 

“I grew up in a difficult family,” Sprung said. “It taught me you can’t always believe what people were saying in my household, so it taught me to be more reliant on the truth of observation.” 

After high school, Sprung attended Cornell University but said she wasn’t interested in academics.

“I just wasn’t enthusiastic about it,” she said. “I always loved painting. I always loved observing people’s faces.”

Sprung stuck out her freshman year but then came home, to her mother’s disappointment.

“She asked me to leave the house and I ventured on my own from there,” Sprung recalled. “It was very hurtful at the time. It was always my heart’s desire to draw people and to observe people.”

Sprung said her mother never truly understood her daughter’s passion for art before she died.

“I think she saw me successful but I just don’t think she ever got it,” Sprung said. “It wasn’t something that was important to her.”

Getting to know you

Sprung began studying at the Art Students League of New York City — where she teaches today — and started showing her work at the Harbor Gallery in Cold Spring Harbor in the 1970s while she was in her 20s.

“Her approach to portraying the figure is that she humanizes them,” said Michael Hall, artistic/executive director at the league. “She’s really trying to capture the essence of the subject of the person.”

A 1976 article in The New York Times about the gallery, which focused on figurative art, criticized her technical skills but said Sprung’s paintings were “the work of someone delving into the spirit of the subject.”

Nowadays those technical skills garner praise as much as her psychological insights. Sprung has painted other history-making political figures who include Patsy Mink — a Japanese American and former representative from Hawaii who was the first woman of color elected to Congress, and who was also a Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient — and Jeannette Rankin, a congressional representative from Montana who was the first woman to hold federal office in the United States. 

Sprung said she always asks subjects for a photograph from childhood, “so that I can see the constant in somebody’s face.” 

The commission to paint the first lady started with a letter toward the end of Barack Obama’s second term. 

“I was very surprised,” Sprung said. “I got a letter from the curator at the White House saying that I was at the top of their list and they’d like to set up an interview.”

Sprung got the job, but the rush at the end of the president’s last term in 2017 made it impossible for Sprung to observe Obama at a public event and get a sense of the first lady’s personality. Instead, they had three sessions at the White House. 

“The first one you just take photos everywhere, different poses and you’re just very free,” Sprung said. Then after a little time “you have a clearer vision of where you want to go and you sort of refine it.”

Obama’s pose, reclining on a red couch at the White House, grew out of those sittings.

“She lived in my studio for eight months,” Sprung said, referring to the photographs of Obama plastered all over her studio while she painted her. “At least from my viewpoint we had a very intimate relationship.

“I know that she’s known for her wide smile, but that’s a photographic thing,” Sprung added. She said she generally doesn’t paint smiles because people don’t stay frozen in that expression.

“I wanted her to look pleasant and relaxed and elegant, which she is very elegant,” Sprung said. “I did that with the pose, and the face was just getting to know her, not necessarily from her directly, but all the pictures, the videos, the books, the photographs; everything.”

The official unveiling last month was nervewracking, Sprung said, adding that she was “terrified.” She said Obama’s reaction when she first saw the portrait was positive. 

“I think she really liked it because I saw the look on her face when she came here,” Sprung said.