Philip Hale

American impressionist painter, draftsman, art historian, and theorist, Philip Hale was the husband of Lilian Westcott Hale, whom he married in 1902. Their daughter, Nancy (1909-88), went on to become a noted writer and editor. The couple was married by Hale’s famous father, the Reverend Edward Everett Hale (1822-1909), who was known as an author, historian, and minister, and belonged to one of Boston’s most distinguished families. His sister Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940) also became a well-known impressionist painter.

Philip Hale studied at the School of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, in New York and later for five years (1887-92) in Paris. There he made friends with Claude Monet and traveled through Europe. He began painting and drawing as a child and later produced drawings in silver-point, sanguine, and pastel, all of which contributed to his reputation as the “Boston Ingres.” From 1893 he also worked as an influential teacher of painting and art history and a guest teacher at Boston University and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before World War I, Hale worked increasingly as an art critic and author.

After his early portraits of women, he painted sports and garden scenes under the influence of his French contemporaries. Characteristic is his dramatic use of colors. After his return to the USA, his paintings turned more traditional again. Hale died in Boston in February 1931 following an emergency appendectomy and his works were exhibited posthumously hors concours in the Art Competitions at Los Angeles in 1932. The painting A Minute’s Rest was shown in an exhibition already in the year 1905. In a newspaper report it was mentioned as “an incident in a prize fight splendidly set forth”.