Who is Lilian Westcott Hale?

Lilian Westcott Hale, daughter of a businessman and piano teacher, is remembered as one of America’s most successful Impressionist painters of the Boston School. She was born in 1881 in Hartford, Connecticut, and began her art education in 1900 at the School of Fine Arts in Boston. An important member of the Boston School of Impressionists, Lilian Westcott Hale won national recognition for her portraits, landscapes, and genre scenes. Today, both her paintings and drawings are praised for their beauty, harmony, and craftsmanship.

Lilian studied at the Hartford Art School (1897-1900), then attended the Boston Museum School (1900-04) on scholarship. Though she married painting instructor Philip Hale in the middle of her training, Lilian’s first solo show was in 1908, also the year of the birth of the Hales’ only child, Anna Westcott Hale, called “Nancy” (see Nancy Hale Papers).

A Wide Range of Work

Lilian Westcott Hale’s typical subject matter includes portraiture, genre interiors, still life, landscapes and “outdoor subjects animated with figures drawn to perfection and delicately refined in nature.”(Pierce Galleries, Inc. )

Though accomplished in each of these areas, Lilian Westcott Hale is perhaps best known for her portraiture. In a review in the Boston Globe, Christine Temin states,

“Her drawings are veiled in a soft haze, the product of a technique based on thousands of wispy vertical strokes. While other figures in this show trumpet their importance, gazing assertively at the viewer, the women in Hale’s drawings are caught in intimate, contemplative moments. And while other interiors in the show are stuffed with Oriental porcelain and fine antiques, Hale’s untitled 1930 room featuring a multi-paned window casting geometric shadows on the floor, has a Shaker simplicity. “^[5

What Made Lilian’s Portraits Special?

“Like Mary Cassatt and other female artists of her day, Hale devoted much of her attention to the sheltered world of women, especially girls. ‘Alice (Sit-by-the-Fire)’ offers a moment of introspection, the silence accented by the soft lighting and muted tones of the artist’s palette. The artist also bathes the scene in warm nostalgia for a simpler time – note the colonial-period interior, which is actually the artist’s studio in Dedham, Massachusetts.”

North Carolina Museum of Art

Boston School of Impressionism

Lilian Westcott Hale’s work is associated with the Boston School of American Impressionism.^[6] Hale studied at the Hartford Art School with Elizabeth Stevens, and in 1899 with William Merritt Chase at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art on Long Island. Her art education continued at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Edmund Tarbell.

Boston artists would develop an Impressionism that centered on people. In Connecticur the focus was place.

Florence Griswold Museum

American Impressionists wanted their pictures to be intimate and inviting. Close viewpoints, off-center compositions, cropped edges, compressed space, bright colors, and sketch-like brushwork were among the ways in which they achieved their goals.

Florence Griswold Museum

‘Floretta’, or ‘Portrait of Agnes Doggett’

A member of the Boston School of Impressionists, Hale focused on capturing the diffusion of natural light in domestic interior scenes and portraits of women in elaborate dress. Here the sitter is Agnes Doggett, a neighbor who frequently posed as a model for Hale—at twenty-five cents an hour, to help defray the costs of her college education. As the original title, Floretta, denotes, the floral motif of the wallpaper is transposed onto the young woman, whose features emerge from amid petal-like ruffles at her collar and sleeve. This ethereal drawing displays the distinctive technique Hale developed to create an effect similar to silverpoint. Having used sandpaper to file her charcoal sticks to fine points, Hale drew in small vertical stitches…

Princeton University Art Museum

Charcoal Portraiture “Without Rival”

A gifted draftsman, Lilian Westcott Hale was widely admired for her charcoal style, characterized by the use of fine, vertical strokes.

Hale was a consummate portraitist, particularly in the medium of charcoal, with a contemporary critic writing, “in her drawing it is safe to say that she is without a rival…Mrs. Hale’s drawings disclose a sensitive beauty…Her shading is obtained by an exquisite mingling of the dark and light masses, this neutrality serving to emphasize the forced high-lights and the depths of the blackness which take on richness.” As demonstrated by the present work, “In her black and white portraiture, Mrs. Hale is most successful.” (R.V.S. Berry, “Lillian Westcott Hale–Her Art,” The American Magazine of Art, vol. XVIII, no. 2, February 1927, pp. 67-68)

More Accolades From Mentors

According to Pierce Galleries, Inc.:

“Lilian Westcott Hale’s mentor Edmund Tarbell exclaimed after seeing her drawings in the one-woman 1908 Boston show, “Your drawings are perfectly beautiful—as fine as anything could be. They belong with our old friends Leonardo, Holbein and Ingres, and are to me the finest modern drawings I have ever seen” (Philip Hale Papers, Box 53a, Folder 1444, SSC) .

William H. Downes wrote on January 22, 1908 in The Boston Transcript that her drawings were superior to the work of the most admired artists Paul Helleu and Charles Dana Gibson and that they had “a distinct elegance of style.”

In fact, Lilian Westcott Hales drawings are considered more important than her oils because her drawings are poetically tender and remarkably rendered with sensitivity. “

Lilian Overcomes Social Constructs

Despite being married with a family, Lilian Westcott Hale pursued a thorough art education and produced work throughout her life that marked her as one of the most successful artists of the Boston School.

Today her work is in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the National Academy of Design, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Phillips Collection, the North Carolina Museum of Art, and The Cleveland Museum of Art. [1]

According to The Hale Family in American Art,

“Lilian Westcott Hale was the most talented and successful of the Hale artists. She was a member of the first generation of American students able to receive a thorough art education without European study. She managed household duties and motherhood while actively pursuing her art career.”

Secret to Success: Family Support

The support of her family was crucial to her success. Philip Leslie Hale wrote to Lilian Westcott while courting her:

“I want what is best for you.  If you feel you want a year or two of foreign study–well–it’s all right…It all rests with you dearest.  Only don’t worry about it.  Whichever way you decide is all right.  What you desire is right.  Why try to decide at all just now?  Just let things slide till it’s borne in on you just what you want to do.  My great and chiefest feeling is that I don’t want you, in the years to come, to look back, and in your heart of hearts regret…I want you to feel that you’ve had a first rate show and haven’t been interfered with–not to feel that ‘it might have been.'”Hale Family in American Art

Lilian Westcott Hale’s mother wrote to her daughter:

“I long to have your brush inspired that it may do those great things that you think it takes a long time of practice and experience for the hand to become responsive to the thought–but it’s coming, Honey, and I hope I shall live to see your work recognized as great.” Hale Family in American Art

I cannot imagine a greater gift than these words.

The End

Sources:

Florence Griswold Museum, Hartford Steam Boiler CollectionThe American Artist in Connecticut, http://flogris.org/collections/online/hartford-steam-boiler-collection/ , (accessed 21Oct 2018).

Pierce Galleries, Inc, “Lilian Wescott Hale Biography”, 2015, http://www.piercegalleries.com/artists/iart_hale_lilian_westcott.html, (accessed 21 Oct 2018).

Hale Family Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Mass., Smith College, “Hale Family Papers, 1787-1988”. Asteria.fivecolleges.edu. “Lilian Wescott Hale”, http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss90.html , (Accessed 21 Oct. 2018).

“Sophia Smith Collection, Online Exhibits – Across the Generations: Exploring U.S. History Through Family Papers – Arts and Leisure”. Smith.edu., schema 2014–2015 addendum image: Self Portrait of Lilian Wescott Hale  (accessed 21Oct 2018).

Wikipedia contributors, “Lilian Westcott Hale,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Lilian_Westcott_Hale&oldid=865095046 (accessed November 21, 2018).

Gammell, R. H. Ives (1986).The Boston Painters: 1900-1930. Orleans, Massachusetts: Parnassus Imprints. (pending).

Princeton University Art Museum, Lilian Westcott Hale, Floretta [Portrait of Agnes Doggett, Later Mrs. Charles Ruddy], ca. 1914, http://artmuseum.princeton.edu/collections/objects/11442 , (accessed 21 Nov 2018).

Norah Hardin Lind, The Hale Family in American Art, exhibit website https://www.halefamilyinamericanart.com/curator.html , (accessed 21 Nov 2018).

http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/sophiasmith/mnsss90.html

Image Sources:

Lilian Westcott Hale (1880-1963), Woman Resting, (c.1920s), Oil on canvas, 20 x 14” Signed upper right, Source: Florence Griswold Museum.

HALE, Lilian Westcott. American, 1881–1963, Self-Portrait, Jeffy, n.d., Conté crayon and pastel on medium weight, slightly textured, cream-colored paper, schema 2014–2015 addendum, Smith.edu .

LILIAN WESTCOTT HALE (1881–1963) , Home Lessons, 1919, Oil on canvas, 46 x 40 in., Source: Phillips Collection.

Lilian Westcott Hale sketching, 1902, Smith College Archives, Sophia Smith Collection

Lilian Westcott Hale (1880-1963), When She Was a Little Girl, ca. 1918, Oil on canvas, 36 x 30 3/16 in. (91.4 x 76.7 cm.), John Lambert Fund, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

Lilian Westcott Hale, American (1880-1963), Alice (Sit-by-the-Fire), 1925, Dimensions 36 x 30 in.(91.4 x 76.2 cm), Source: NCMA, Credit: Bequest of Clarence Poe in memory of his wife, Alice Aycock Poe.

Lilian Westcott Hale, Lady with a blue fan, 1916, oil on panel, 30 x 25in, Source: MutualArt.

Lilian Westcott Hale, Drawing of her daughter, Nancy, circa 1914, Sophia Smith Collection
(photographic reproduction; photographer unknown) https://www.smith.edu/libraries/libs/ssc/atg/popuphale9.html

Lilian Westcott Hale, (Hartford, CT 1880 − St. Paul, MN 1963), The Convalescent (Zeffy in Bed) ,1906, oil on canvas, 30 3/16 × 22 inches (76.676 × 55.88 cm), Sheldon Museum of Art, Nebraska Art Association, Beatrice Rohman Fund.

Lilian Westcott Hale (1881-1963) Portrait of a Woman signed ‘Lilian Westcott Hale’ (upper right) pencil and charcoal on paper sight, 22 ¼ x 14 ¼ in. (56.5 x 35.6 cm.), Source: Christie’s.

Lilian Westcott Hale, American, 1881 – 1963 Floretta [Portrait of Agnes Doggett, Later Mrs. Charles Ruddy], ca. 1914, Black chalk over charcoal and graphite on cream laminated drawing board, 74.1 x 58.5 cm (29 3/16 x 23 1/16 in.) Gift of the Friends of The Art Museum, Source: Princeton University Art Museum.

Books I Want:

• The Boston Painters . Author: RH Ives Gammell
• Life in the Studio (Lilian and Philip Hale) . Author: Nancy Hale

Thanks for Visiting 🙂

~Sunnyside