‘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…
Tag: Lilian Westcott Hale
Lilian Westcott Hale: American Impressionist
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…
Lilian Westcott Hale: Portrait of a Woman
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…
Lilian Westcott Hale: Black Eyed Susans
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…
Lilian Westcott Hale: The Convalescent (1906)
Echoes of Japanese Prints – and Monet Lilian Westcott Hale, whose work is associated with the Boston School of American Impressionism, painted The Convalescent in 1906, shortly after completion of her formal art training at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts. Typical of American Impressionists of the time, Hale chose an…
At Sunnyside - Where Truth and Beauty Meet 