American impressionist painter Philip Leslie Hale was born into a prominent Boston family. His first art lessons came from his older sister Ellen Day Hale, an artist, and his aunt Susan Hale, who also had trained as a painter. He studied formally at the the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, with Edmund Tarbell before moving to New York to study at the Art Students League with J. Alden Weir and Kenyon Cox. In 1887, he went to Paris and studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian. He befriended Theodore Butler and William Howard Hart, traveling to Giverny with them in the summer of 1888. He became part of a circle of American painters experimenting with impressionism and inspired by the work of Claude Monet. In 1893, he returned to the United States and began teaching at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he would remain an instructor until his death in 1931. He also taught at the Worcester Art Museum and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and published essays on art, including the first monograph in English devoted to Jan Vermeer. He was married to the painter Lilian Westcott Hale.
