The son of the important author and clergyman the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, Philip Hale was born into a Boston Brahmin family. Among his relatives were the Revolutionary War patriot Nathan Hale and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe. The young artist began his academic training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, under Edmund C. Tarbell and at the Art Students League, New York, under Kenyon Cox and J. Alden Weir.
Hale sailed for France in 1887 and spent five years working the Académie Julian and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. During the summers of 1888 and 1889, while working in Giverny, the art colony centered on Claude Monet, he befriended the American painter Theodore Butler. It was also there that Hale began to develop his unique and sophisticated interpretation of French Impressionism, adopting the rich palette, brilliant light, and sophisticated brushstroke of Monet's style in his own landscapes. In 1889, prompted by a strong desire to study the works of Diego Velásquez, Hale and his friends and fellow artists William Howard Hunt and Henry Prellwitz traveled to Spain.
Hale had returned to Boston studio by 1893, the year he first exhibited in a National Academy annual. He would participate only once more, in 1895, until the winter exhibition of 1916, when he received the Thomas R. Proctor Prize for portraiture. Thereafter, he was represented in Academy annuals on a yearly basis, often submitting works to winter exhibitions as well.
Giverny drew the artist back during the summers from 1891 to 1893. In the subsequent years of that decade, he produced his most experimental works, brilliantly colored and stylistically advanced paintings that looked to the Neoimpressionism of Georges Seurat and Paul Signac as well as to European symbolism. Hale evolved a delicate pointillist technique that captured the shimmering effects of sunlight on scenes of outdoor leisure activities.
Hale married the painter Lilian Wescott of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1902. The couple rented connecting studios in Boston's prestigious Fenway Studios, where Hale painted less radical Impressionist-inspired portraits and domestic subjects. A noted lecturer and teacher, he was affiliated not only with the School of the Museum of Fine Arts but also with Boston University, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Hale's talent extended to writing as well; he published numerous reviews and critical essays for newspapers and art magazines. His book Jan Vermeer of Delft, which reappraised the life and work of an artist particularly admired by Boston school painters, was published in 1913.
ML