Philip Leslie Hale, a descendant of Nathan Hale and the son of famed clergyman and author Edward Everett Hale, was born into a distinguished Boston family. He confounded family expectations when he chose not to attend Harvard, but, with the encouragement of his aunt, the artist Susan Hale, enrolled in the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1883. The following year he entered the Art Students League, New York, studying under J. Alden Weir and Kenyon Cox. Hale’s education continued with a trip to Paris in 1887 in the company of fellow student, Theodore Earl Butler (1861–1936), later Claude Monet s son-in-law. While in Paris, he studied at the Académie Julian and the École des Beaux-Arts, where he acquired a thorough academic training under such teachers as Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. In 1888, Hale spent the first of many summers in Giverny, the sleepy river village made famous by Monet. There, the artist evolved away from his earlier academic manner to one that was more impressionistic. Throughout the 1890s, Hale developed his distinctive impressionist technique, characterized by richly textured impasto and an attention to the effects of light and atmosphere. In 1902, Hale married Lilian Westcott, an art student at the Boston Museum School who went on to become a noted artist in her own right.
Hale established a career for himself as an instructor at the Boston Museum School where he was a fixture from 1893 until 1931, teaching antique and life drawing and anatomy for artists. He made a mark as an art critic, commentator, and art historian. He served as the Paris critic for a magazine called Arcadia in 1892–93, wrote art criticism for the Boston Herald, and was the author, in 1904, of the first American text on the Dutch painter Jan Vermeer.
