Although Ballin only studied with him for a few years before Eaton's death in 1896, Eaton’s mentorship left an indelible impact on Ballin’s artistic style and career. Through his relationship with Eaton, he became acquainted with painter Robert Frederick Blum, who invited Ballin to assist on his murals at Mendelssohn Hall. Ballin then enrolled in classes at the Arts Students League of New York, where he was awarded a scholarship for his composition. After graduating, Ballin travelled to Rome where he joined the National Arts Club and spent thirteen months studying the rich figure painting of the Renaissance, painting and socializing with other members of the club. He then rented a studio space from Michele Gordigiani, an Italian portraitist, in Gordigiani's home outside Florence for several months where he had his first solo exhibition. Robert Blum came to see the exhibition and together he and Ballin traveled through Tuscany, the Adriatic coast, Sicily, Calabria and Naples exploring classical Italian frescos. Ballin also visited Munich, Paris and London, but the majority of his three years abroad were spent in Italy.³

Art as refined culture & public good
Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that Ballin’s earliest paintings upon his return to New York in 1905 were recognized for their “archaism of the pre-Raphaelite manner.” “He reminds one of the old masters,” one reviewer wrote, “who add [to] likeness some sense of mystery, some vision or symbol. Less spiritual than [George Frederick] Watts, less sensuous than [William Michael] Rossetti, goes back to the Italian masters as they did for inspiration.”⁴ Ballin’s earliest works featured beautiful and idealized female figures, often in pastoral settings, representing classical characters from ancient myths and biblical stories. In "Sibylla Europa" (1910), for example, Ballin painted a scene of a mother holding her young child while seeking predictions from the Sibylla Europa, a female oracle of ancient Greek mythology who, according to legend, had prophesied the Massacre of the Innocents, King Herod’s murderous hunt for baby Jesus as recounted in Matthew 2:16-18. Renaissance master Jacques Stella depicted the "Sibylla Europa" in his series of woodcuts of the Sibyls of Greek mythology in 1625. Ballin, likely influenced by that work, placed his figures in a bucolic scene to represent the story, the mother serving as a symbol of the universal Mother, her baby as the innocence and purity of all mankind, both awaiting their fate as told by the oracle. Like his other paintings in the early 1900s, it featured “idealized types of an idealized age, permanent, elemental, removed from passion, unconscious of their surroundings…” and displayed a “combination of classical formula, poetry, realism and romanticism.”⁵

Ballin’s beautiful, virginal female figures embodied his vision of art as an elevated, refined form of culture. He had a deep admiration for the master painters of Europe, not simply for their work, but also for their revered status in European society. Influenced by both his mentorship with Eaton and his own education in Europe, he viewed art as a skilled craft to be honed through years of apprenticeship and master artists as cultural elites who possessed superior taste and refined sense of beauty. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Ballin did not believe that American artists should adapt their work to appeal to a broad audience or expect their work would “exact reverence from all observers.” Just as an individual had to develop “a certain skill and proficiency” before he could be considered an artist, so too was “education… needed to appreciate a masterpiece of art.” Instead, true artists like him, wealthy patrons and other cultural elites, should aspire to replicate the transcendent beauty of the European masters and, by doing so, elevate the taste of the American public at large. Ballin’s hierarchical understanding of taste and culture made his attitudes about art rather snobbish, but he, like many of his peers, believed their art served a public purpose; their role as artists was to create “pure decorative beauty” that would enrich and improve American society.⁶

Ballin finds his muse

Ballin’s “pre-Raphaelite” style was well received by art circles in New York. Upon his return to the city, he was inducted as a member of the Society of American Artists and awarded their Shaw Fund Prize in 1905 for his piece “Pastoral.” In the same year, his “Mother and Child” received the National Academy of Design’s annual Thomas B. Clarke Prize and in 1907, he received the Academy’s Julius Hallgarten Prize and their Isidor Gold Medal. He worked with painters Kenneth Hayes Miller and Gustave Ciomiotti, Jr., to organize the Society of Young Painters and rented a space in Holbein Studios on 55th Street, just blocks away from the Mendelssohn Club Building where he had helped Robert Blum complete his murals as a teenager. In 1909, Ballin met a young actress named Mabel Croft and fell deeply in love. Within months they married and purchased a large home on the Saugatuck River in Connecticut. His affection for his wife was obvious to some observers who noted “traces of certain singularly attractive feminine features asserting themselves more and more in his canvasses” likely because he “unconsciously reproduces her features in his work.”⁷ With a beautiful new wife and a successful career as a painter and portraitist, Hugo Ballin had firmly established himself within the Beaux-Arts movement and the New York art world by the time he turned thirty. In 1912, he received the largest and most prestigious commission of his young career: an invitation to paint twenty-six murals in the Executive Chamber of the new Wisconsin State Capitol.
American Beaux-Arts in Wisconsin
The decorative art included in the capitol building in Madison reflected a stylistic shift among American artists of the Beaux-Arts school, described by art historian Bailey Van Hook in her book, The Virgin and the Dynamo. Although European-educated artists of Wyatt Eaton’s generation worked to foster an "American Renaissance," they did not always agree about how exactly to forge a distinctly American style. Ballin, like his mentors Eaton and Blum, believed in emulating and preserving the traditional forms and techniques of the European masters. But replicating these strategies was also limiting and an increasing number of younger American artists who were closer in age to Ballin opted to experiment with new forms and techniques. Also educated in Europe, these artists sought to capture the dynamic changes occurring in American society in the age industrialization, urbanization, and immigration. To establish a more “modern” American style in mural painting, they replaced allegory with history. Instead of using idealized, female figures to serve as symbols in their paintings, they opted for more realistic, masculine figures to represent characters from American history. They featured “real” events, rather than ancient legends, relating stories that would educate the American public about the country's history, cultivate patriotism, and assert a proud, American nationalism. As Bailey Van Hook argues, replacing idealized female figures (virgins) with modern, dynamic masculine ones (dynamos) reflected a shift from idealism to modernism, emerging among American artists that was part of their efforts to forge a uniquely American national style.⁸