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Charles Sydney Hopkinson (July 27, 1869 - October,
1962) was a United States portrait painter and
landscape watercolorist. He maintained a studio in
the Fenway Studios building in Boston from 1906 to
1962. He painted over 800 portraits in a direct
style with a palette gradually lightening through
his career. 

Many of his paintings were commissioned by U. S.
East Coast institutions, especially Harvard
University, where he acted as house portraitist.
Among his sitters were Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr.|Oliver Wendell Holmes, Calvin Coolidge, and
John Masefield. 

He began to draw for the Harvard Lampoon upon his
entrance to Harvard in 1888, and in 1891, he moved
to New York to study at the Art Students' League
where he worked with John Henry Twachtman and H.
Siddons Mowbray. 

Hopkinson studied at the Academie Julian in Paris
with Edmond Aman-Jean, traveled to Brittany, and
exhibited in the 1895 Paris Salon. In the late
1890's he worked in Cambridge, Massachusetts and
showed his paintings in New York at the Society of
American Artists and also in Boston.

He returned to Europe in 1901, where he visited
Spain to study the painting of Velazquez and El
Greco and traveled through Brittany, and Holland
to see portraits by his "heroes," Franz Hals and
Rembrandt. 

Hopkinson then began a lucrative career as a
portrait painter in Cambridge, his first
commission being a baby portrait in 1896 of poet
E. E. Cummings, a work that is in the
Massachusetts Historical Society. 

Adopting the color theories of his former neighbor
Denman Ross, who had become a prominent collector
and a teacher at Harvard, Hopkinson later used the
results of Carl Cutler's experiments with a
spinning disk to study the color spectrum. 

He exhibited regularly in the national annuals and
at several Boston and New York galleries. His
watercolors were described as "modern" in the
press and he exhibited three oils in the 1913
Armory Show. Instead of allying himself with the
local established painters, Hopkinson showed his
work with the "Boston Five," a group of young
watercolorists though he continued to paint in oil
for an elite clientele.

In 1919 the National Art Commission selected him
to paint some of the participants of the Peace
Conference at Versailles, France.

In the mid 1920s, Hopkinson took on a young Boston
painter Pietro Pezzati as his assistant, who
worked with him at his Fenway studio. Hopkinson
would pass on his studio to Pezzati when he died
in October 1962, in Massachusetts.