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Philip Leslie Hale
1865–1931
BirthplaceBoston, Massachusetts, United States of America
Death placeDedham, Massachusetts, United States of America
BiographyBorn into an old and distinguished Boston family, Philip Leslie Hale was active as a writer and teacher as well as painter and print-maker. Hale’s father was the respected clergyman, writer, and social reformer Edward Everett Hale, and both his aunt, Susan Hale (1833–1910), and his older sister, Ellen Day Hale (1854–1939), were painters who encouraged his artistic interests. Hale was permitted to study art only after he had passed the Harvard University entrance examination. He studied at the Boston Museum school in 1883 and then at the Art Students League in New York City, where his teachers included painters J. Alden Weir and Kenyon Cox (1856–1919). Hale traveled to Paris in 1887 and enrolled in the private Académie Julian and the official Ecole des Beaux-Arts. During this time he also began his career as a writer on art.
Between 1888 and 1892, Hale spent almost every summer in the artists’ colony in Giverny, in rural Normandy. Under the influence of the village’s most famous resident, Claude Monet (1840–1926), he adopted the bright light and broken brushwork of impressionism but eventually developed an individual interpretation in his delicate, ethereal paintings in which figures virtually dissolve in an aura of light. The touch of mystery in Hale’s Giverny images suggests the impact of the symbolist movement, in which ordinary objects are invested with powerful symbolic overtones, and the related technical experiments of the so-called neo-impressionist Georges Seurat (1859–1891), who used tiny contrasting strokes of color to create an effect at once shimmering and strangely static.
Hale began teaching at the Boston Museum school in 1893. His unique painting style was not well-received locally, however, and both the school’s traditional, academic program, and his marriage in 1902 to the comparatively more conservative figure painter Lilian Westcott (1881–1963) influenced Hale’s move toward a more acceptable impressionist mode, one that combined full modeling of the figure in space with broken brushwork and bright, outdoor color. He began to paint images of women at leisure in garden settings that were consistent with current taste in pleasing, genteel subject matter.
In addition to painting, Hale lectured widely and wrote about art and artists for various periodicals. In 1913, he published the first book by an American on seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer (1622–1669 or 1670), whose polished views of quiet domestic interiors were highly prized in Boston. Hale was largely responsible for Vermeer’s influence on the so-called Boston School, a group of artists led by his fellow instructors Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson. Beginning around 1910, Hale himself adopted the group’s prevailing aesthetic of meticulous technique and its intimate interior subjects, often infusing them with sentiment. He also painted allegorical scenes of idealized female figures. In his last works, however, he returned somewhat to a more traditionally impressionist manner in garden scenes. Widely exhibited, Hale’s works had garnered a significant number of awards when the artist died suddenly at the age of sixty-six.
Between 1888 and 1892, Hale spent almost every summer in the artists’ colony in Giverny, in rural Normandy. Under the influence of the village’s most famous resident, Claude Monet (1840–1926), he adopted the bright light and broken brushwork of impressionism but eventually developed an individual interpretation in his delicate, ethereal paintings in which figures virtually dissolve in an aura of light. The touch of mystery in Hale’s Giverny images suggests the impact of the symbolist movement, in which ordinary objects are invested with powerful symbolic overtones, and the related technical experiments of the so-called neo-impressionist Georges Seurat (1859–1891), who used tiny contrasting strokes of color to create an effect at once shimmering and strangely static.
Hale began teaching at the Boston Museum school in 1893. His unique painting style was not well-received locally, however, and both the school’s traditional, academic program, and his marriage in 1902 to the comparatively more conservative figure painter Lilian Westcott (1881–1963) influenced Hale’s move toward a more acceptable impressionist mode, one that combined full modeling of the figure in space with broken brushwork and bright, outdoor color. He began to paint images of women at leisure in garden settings that were consistent with current taste in pleasing, genteel subject matter.
In addition to painting, Hale lectured widely and wrote about art and artists for various periodicals. In 1913, he published the first book by an American on seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer (1622–1669 or 1670), whose polished views of quiet domestic interiors were highly prized in Boston. Hale was largely responsible for Vermeer’s influence on the so-called Boston School, a group of artists led by his fellow instructors Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson. Beginning around 1910, Hale himself adopted the group’s prevailing aesthetic of meticulous technique and its intimate interior subjects, often infusing them with sentiment. He also painted allegorical scenes of idealized female figures. In his last works, however, he returned somewhat to a more traditionally impressionist manner in garden scenes. Widely exhibited, Hale’s works had garnered a significant number of awards when the artist died suddenly at the age of sixty-six.