Portrait of a Woman

Lilian Westcott Hale studied under William Merritt Chase at his Shinnecock, Long Island, summer school before taking classes at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston with Edmund Tarbell and Philip Leslie Hale, her future husband. 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)