Douglas Hofmann

Douglas Hofmann (American, b. 1945) is a contemporary realist whose figurative paintings are prized for their luminous surfaces, exquisite detail, and softly lit forms. Born in Baltimore to German-American parents, he traces his patience and precision to childhood hours spent building and painting model trains with his father. A brief, abandoned stint in business school led to a department-store window-display job — an unlikely schooling in color and composition — before he enrolled at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

The Maroger Method & Old Master Light

There, under the painter Joseph Sheppard, he mastered the Maroger method: an Old Masters oil technique, named for the French conservator Jacques Maroger, that builds an image in thin, glowing, jewel-like layers much as Vermeer and the Baroque painters did. That training defines his work — the warm light and atmosphere of seventeenth-century painting brought to graceful nudes and his celebrated ballet series, where dancers are caught in moments of quiet poise rather than performance.

Collecting Douglas Hofmann

After joining Circle Fine Art in 1977, Hofmann learned lithography and exhibited across the United States, Canada, and Japan, gathering numerous Best in Show and traditional-painting honors. His original oils are painstaking and rare; his hand-pulled lithographs — fine-art prints drawn and printed by the traditional stone-and-press method — carry that Old Masters luminosity to collectors worldwide, in signed and numbered editions.