Philip Leslie Hale (American, 1865 to 1931)
American Impressionist painter Philip Leslie Hale was born in 1865, son of the prominent Bostonian Reverend Edward Everett Hale. After studying in America with Edmund Tarbell, J. Alden Weir, and Kenyon Cox, Hale first traveled to Paris in 1887 to study at the Academie Julian with Henri Doucet and Joseph Lefebvre and at the Ecole des Beaux Arts. A year later he traveled to the artist’s colony at Giverny, where many of his fellow expatriate artists were working. There, he was strongly influenced by the Impressionist style of one of the movement’s leading figures, Claude Monet. Hale returned to the U.S. around 1895, where he was considered a leader in the Boston School of painting, a group of artists which included Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson and William MacGregor Paxton. He “quickly adopted the most progressive aspects of the modern French art movements and by the mid 1890s, was producing dazzling, Neo-impressionist scenes of diaphanous women bathed in golden light.”1 These paintings, however, were distinctly American in style; often done in Matunuck, Rhode Island, they presented a combination of modeled figures with high-keyed color and broken brush work.2 A copy of the exhibition catalog accompanies the lot.
1. Keny, James, Butler Museum of Art, http://www.butlerart.com/pc_book/pages/philip_leslie_hale_1865.htm.
2. Ibid.
Information courtesy of Skinner, Inc. August 2007.