Philip Leslie Hale 1865-1931

An influential critic, writer and teacher, Philip Leslie Hale was an American Impressionist with an experimental, avant-garde approach to painting. Hale was born in Boston in 1865, the son Reverend Edward Hale, a Boston clergyman and a relative of Nathan Hale. He studied with Ellen Day Hale, his sister, and Edmund Tarbell at the Boston Museum School, with J. Alden Weir at the Art Students League in New York City, and then went to Paris for further studies at the Academie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. He remained in France for fifteen years, returning to America about 1895. During that time, from 1888, he spent summers at Giverny, France with his good friend, artist, Theodore Butler, and became well acquainted with Claude Monet. Traveling throughout Europe, Hale visited the major museums, and copied the works of Ingres, Vermeer, Watteau and Michelangelo.

Hale married Lilian Westcott Hale, a well respected artist, and they had a daughter, Nancy Hale. He taught for many years at the Boston Museum School and also for several years at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He died in Boston in 1931, of a ruptured appendix. Boston's Vose Galleries held a retrospective exhibition of Hale's work in 1966.