Spanierman Gallery | An American Art Blog

Carol Lowrey

Philip Leslie Hale (1865 - 1931), "Young Woman Adjusting Veil of Her Hat," pencil on paper, 10 3/4 x 8 in.

At a recent lecture at the National Academy of Design, the eminent academician Will Barnet (b. 1911) discussed his take on figure painting.  As many of you know, Will has dabbled in abstraction at various times in his career, but he is best known for his figure subjects, executed in an elegant and very ordered style that combines an objective realism with the simplified, hard-edged forms of modernism.  Like so many artists of his generation, he spent his formative years studying traditional methods of figure drawing, greatly encouraged, as he pointed out, by the example of Philip Leslie Hale (1865-1931), his favorite teacher at Boston’s Museum School.

The son of the Reverend Edward Everett Hale, the acclaimed author, orator and preacher, Hale created colorful paintings in an advanced impressionist style (I’ll discuss these in a future blog) and as a penman he wrote insightful criticism on contemporary European art, as well as an influential book on Vermeer. He also produced exquisite drawings.  Indeed, Hale loved to draw and did so incessantly throughout his career.  As a young man he drew illustrations for the Harvard Lampoon, going on to hone his technique in the art schools of Boston, New York and then Paris, where he was known as the “crack” draftsman of the famous Académie Julian.  Hale’s affinity for drawing was heightened when he was appointed an instructor in Antique Drawing at the Museum School, where he taught for over thirty years.  And in his spare time (as related in Nancy Hale’s 1969 memoir, The Life in the Studio), he would typically spend his evenings in his study, “drawing under a blue bulb shaded by a paper-clipped sheet of paper . . . drawing . . . just for the pleasure of drawing . . . until two or three in the morning.” Read the rest of this entry »