Featured Painting by Philip Leslie Hale |
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Philip Leslie Hale (1865-1931)
A Summer Visit (Matunuck, Rhode Island), 1895
Oil on canvas, 32 x 39 inches
Signed, dated, and inscribed lower right: Phillip Hale / Rhode Island '95
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A Summer Visit
by Philip Leslie Hale
By the autumn of 1893, when he returned to Boston from Paris to take up his new position as a drawing instructor at the Museum School, Philip Leslie Hale was well on his way to developing his own personal approach to Impressionism. During his years abroad he had thoroughly immersed himself in the vibrant art life of the French capital: as the Paris correspondent for the ambitious Montreal-based art journal Arcadia, for example, he had the opportunity to familiarize himself with all aspects of vanguard art, including Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism, on which he wrote concise and insightful commentaries. Hale studied the work of the Symbolist painters and the Nabis too, and through reading and discussion acquired a sound knowledge of contemporary color theories. He had also made numerous visits to the Anglo-American art colony in Giverny, where he was exposed to the work of Claude Monet and to that of his American counterparts who had embraced Impressionism. So inspired, Hale abandoned his dark, academic style in favor of modern strategies of light and color, taking his brand of Impressionism well beyond the approach adopted by his contemporaries. Seeking to convey the most intense effects of vibrating sunlight, he eschewed the broken brush technique employed by most of his cohorts and instead adopted a divisionist manner that allowed him to dissolve his figures in an aura of light; it was his opinion that “in certain effects, as in brilliant sunlight, {Divisionism} suggests luminosity in a way which no other method does.”
Hale began employing divisionist strategies in the early 1890s during his seasonal trips to Giverny. However, he made his most complete forays into that technique after his return to Boston, when he would spend his summers with his aunt, the writer Susan Hale, in the town of Matunuck, in southwestern Rhode Island. Located on the south shore of Block Island Sound, Matunuck was a venerable art colony, attracting writers and actors as well as artists. Indeed, the town also provided out-of-towners with a pleasant climate, rolling terrain with fragrant mountain laurel, and a “continuous front line of beaches behind which lie many ‘salt ponds’.” Hale and his aunt resided in the house that belonged to his father, the author, novelist and clergyman, Reverend Edward Everett Hale. Situated on a hill not far from the main road leading to nearby Wakefield, it was surrounded by lush pine groves as well as several salt ponds (such as Long Pond and Wash Pond), where the Hales and their guests would go swimming or boating.
In addition to socializing and conducting outdoor painting classes from June to September, Hale spent much of his time creating images of refined young women (many of them his students) in pleasant landscape settings, wearing diaphanous dresses and bathed in what one model described as the “enchanting light” of late afternoon.” He would often pose his figures next to one of the local salt ponds, as is apparent in works such as A Summer Visit, a rare example from the artist’s Matunuck period. Here, the protagonists wear the same thin, ruffled muslin gowns that appear in other Matunuck oils, such as his well-known Girls in Sunlight (ca. 1897; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston), although in this case the models hold parasols. As in other works from this period, Hale demonstrates an acute awareness of Japanese design principles—an interest he shared with many American Impressionists—by his inclusion of patterned foliage at the bottom of the composition and in the plunging diagonal created by the railing on which one of the models leans. Indeed, in an article he wrote for the Boston Commonwealth in March of 1895, Hale discussed the impact of Japanese prints, especially the work of Utamora, on his own art and that of other painters, such as Mary Cassatt. In a follow-up text written later that year, he observed that “By getting an unexpected or original point of view . . . you can get quite a Japanese look to your composition,” and went on to advise his reader to “paint through Japanese spectacles.” Writing to his friend William Howard Hart in July of 1895, we can assume that Hale may have had canvases such as A Summer Visit in mind when he stated that he had been striving for “Japanese effects” in his latest paintings.
A Summer Visit was painted at a time when, as Hale also wrote to Hart, he had gone “très Impressioniste.” For Hale, that meant combining his divisionist manner with the intense yellow-toned palette that characterizes his Matunuck canvases. To be sure, advertising his services as a teacher of plein air techniques, Hale advised prospective students to “bring . . . plenty of chrome yellow no. 1,” forewarning them that “it is well to anticipate the yellow fever.” Invented in 1809, chrome yellow (also known as “Paris yellow” and “Jonquil chrome yellow”) was used by many European artists throughout the nineteenth century. It appears, for example, in the palette of the Impressionists, but by and large it was used somewhat cautiously throughout the 1870s and 80s. However, as Neo-Impressionist and Symbolist painters began to apply color in a non-descriptive manner, chrome yellow became increasingly popular, especially with painters such as Vincent van Gogh. In A Summer Visit, this vivid, high-keyed hue is used to convey the glowing luminosity of saturated sunlight as it falls across the figures and setting. However, as well as denoting natural light, this dazzling color also creates a magical, otherworldly mood, the effects of which are enhanced by an array of fresh greens, pastel pinks and mauves.
While most Impressionists embraced the notion of spontaneity, applying their pigments in a fluid, painterly manner, Hale developed a technique, derived from his exposure to Neo-Impressionism, that was deliberate and controlled. He would typically start his canvases in the open air, but would later refine them indoors, where he could “see how they look in different lights” and “put on complimentaries and prismatic edges.” His approach is readily apparent in A Summer Visit, wherein the surface consists of a complex color-weave—an intricate network of small, directional brushstrokes that merge and mingle when seen from a distance. As well as evoking the sensations of sunlight, Hale’s method also creates a sense of animation, and contributes, as well, to the overall decorative quality of the painting. The exact sources for Hale’s avant-garde style are not known, but his practice of using elaborately woven color threads resembles the methods of the Italian Divisionists, such as Giovanni Segantini and Alessandro Morbelli. Hale was likewise aware of Camille Pissarro’s recent shift to a Neo-Impressionist technique, and while in Paris, he had also had the opportunity to examine the pointillist paintings of the Symbolist painter Henri Martin.
Hale’s advanced form of Impressionism, as revealed in A Summer Visit, startled the art world in 1899, when he exhibited a selection of such paintings at the gallery of Durand-Ruel in New York. Some critics, many of whom had not yet accepted Impressionism even its most conventional form, were confused by the display, one declaring “the yellow girls rambling or lolling, or disappearing in nebulous phantasy” to be “outré,” while another found the pictures “too extreme to be commended.” A few others, among them a reviewer for Art Amateur, saw the work for what it was—that of a “courageous modern” and “one of the boldest of the American Impressionists . . . {who was} not content to do over again what has been done before.” Another commentator declared that the exhibit “showed painting of sunlight that seemed . . . more convincing than any other” he had seen.”
Discouraged by the mixed reaction to the 1899 show and stimulated by his activity as a drawing teacher at the Museum School, Hale went on to realign his aesthetic goals, adopting a conservative brand of Impressionism that emphasized structured designs and a restrained yet cheerful palette. He continued to explore the theme of genteel female types in outdoor settings, going on to emerge as one of the leading members of the Boston School of figure painters. However, in the annals of American Impressionism, it is the paintings of the “yellow girls” of Matunuck that stand out in his oeuvre, affirming his assimilation of the rich and very complex lessons of vanguard European painting and identifying him as one of the earliest American exponents of Neo-Impressionism. Certainly, works such as A Summer Visit represent the most innovative--and extreme--phase of Hale’s art, when he emerged as the most radical of the American Impressionists, an experimenter who “had worked out a great many things about vibrations of color, pointillism . . . of getting the most colorful effect with the limitations of paint . . . he worked it all out for himself long before the others.”
CL
© The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery, LLC and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery, LLC, and may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission from Spanierman Gallery, LLC, nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery, LLC.
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