Henry Wingate began his training as a painter at the age of 28, after having served six years as a pilot in the Navy. From an early age he showed an interest in drawing and would have begun his formal study of painting on finishing high school had he found a college or studio that offered training in the traditional representational art that appealed to him. At that time, in the mid 1980's, modern art seemed to be completely dominant in college art departments, and Wingate chose another route. He received an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy and graduated from Annapolis with a degree in History in 1988. He went on to flight school and ended up as an F-14 pilot stationed at Oceana, Virginia, and on board the USS Kennedy.

The six years in the Navy gave Wingate something of a late start toward his real career, the one he knew he would follow after the flying was over. On leaving the Navy, he discovered that there was a small group of ateliers, or working studios, teaching painting in the representational style that he had always loved. In 1994 he moved to Boston to study with Paul Ingbretson. He spent five years in the Ingbretson atelier and then added two short stints with another teacher from the same tradition, Charles Cecil, in Florence, Italy. Both Ingbretson and Cecil studied under Ives Gammell, the teacher, writer, and painter who kept the traditional atelier method of painting instruction alive, which formed a link back to the Paris ateliers of the 19th century. Gammell had been a student of the Boston painter, William Paxton, who, in turn, had studied at the Paris atelier of Gerome.

Now, pleased to be part of this tradition, Wingate has his studio in rural Madison, Virginia. He lives with his wife Mary and their seven children in nearby Front Royal. He paints portraits, landscapes, and still-lifes, as well as larger figurative works.

Wingate has won numerous awards, including First Prize in the American Society of Portrait Artists 2000 competition, the Gold Medal of Honor at the 2003 Hudson Valley Art Association annual exhibition, and the Best Painting from Life Award of the National Oil & Acrylic Painters' Society in 2003. His work was featured in the 2006 issue of Portrait Highlights and as the cover article in the November, 2002, issue of American Artist.

Painting Trips to Italy

In 2007 Henry Wingate was awarded an Elizabeth Greenshields Grant to further his studies in traditional art. He decided to use the grant as a chance to study in Rome. This is the city where the Prix de Rome winners were sent for years of study as a way to finish their time of training as painters, sculptors, or architects. Wingate spent three months in Rome and another month painting landscapes in a tiny village in the mountains of northern Tuscany. In Rome he drew from antique sculptures in the Vatican Museums, the Spada Gallery, and in the Palazzo Altemps. He also drew from Renaissance paintings, both fresco and oil. He was also given permission to paint a copy of the Velazquez portrait of Pope Innocent X that is in the Galleria Doria Pamphilj. He spent seven days painting this copy in the museum.

The art critic, Royal Cortissoz, has written an essay about the importance of Rome as a "finishing school" for artists. It can be found as a chapter, "The American Academy in Rome" in the book American Artists, published in 1923 by Charles Scribner's Sons. He speaks of Rome as giving the artist the "opportunity to live in contact with masterpieces and so to fertilize their imaginations," and to the artist Rome meant "inspiration, beauty." It was just these that Henry Wingate hoped to acquire with this time spent in Rome.

In 2012 Henry Wingate made another extended painting trip to Italy with a short excursion into Switzerland. This trip lasted four months and consisted mostly of landscape drawing and painting. Approximately twenty drawings and twenty paintings were executed during this trip. The month of May was spent in the small, hill-top Umbrian town of Todi. Following this the artist spent fourteen days drawing and painting in Venice. Two months were spent in a village in northern Tuscany near Pontremoli. From there trips were made to Parma, Milan, and Lugano, Switzerland. Ten days were spent there painting the mountains and lake. The final several weeks were spent in Florence. The entire trip was very productive artistically.