MILTON, MASS.- In early February, Historic New England will add Mount Chocorua, a c. 1895 oil painting by Ellen Day Hale, to the collection of paintings on display at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts.

Ellen Day Hale (1855-1940) was one of the hundreds of women who trained as an artist in Boston and France in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. She studied in Boston with William Rimmer in 1873 and at the Museum School with William Morris Hunt and Helen Knowlton from 1874-1877. She also trained at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1878 and 1879, and in 1881 studied in France at the studio of Carolus-Duran, who taught John Singer Sargent among others, and then at the Académie Julian.

In the 1890s Hale traveled to Giverny to learn from the Impressionist master Claude Monet. Her colors became lighter and her style more impressionistic. Mount Chocorua is clearly impressionistic, reflecting the artist’s interpretation of the newly prevailing style in France. Her vertical format places more emphasis on the water, which enables her to concentrate on blues and violets. Hale submitted Mount Chocorua to the 1885 Salon in Paris, but while another of her paintings was accepted, Mount Chocorua was not. When displayed two years later in Boston, a local reviewer praised it as “refreshingly unconventional and lifelike.” After returning from France in the mid-1890s, she and her companion, Philadelphia artist Gabrielle de Veaux Clements, were among the founders of the popular artist colony at Folly Cove on Cape Ann in Massachusetts.

Family connections
Hale’s father was author and minister Edward Everett Hale. Her brother Philip and sister-in-law Lilian Westcott Hale were successful artists. There are many powerful and creative women in her family, including her great-aunts Harriet Beecher Stowe and Katherine Beecher and her first cousin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the author of the landmark feminist novel The Yellow Wallpaper.

The paintings at the Eustis Estate, now and more in May
Mount Chocorua will be on display at the Eustis Estate this February. It is one of many works of art on view in the house. Visitors will have an opportunity to see more paintings from Historic New England’s extensive collection when the exhibition Artful Stories: Paintings from Historic New England opens in May.

The Eustis Estate was designed by Boston architect William Ralph Emerson and built in 1878. It sits on eighty acres of picturesque landscape at the base of the Blue Hills and is full of stunning, intact architectural and design details. Tours include information on the elaborate architecture and interior design as well as the Eustis family, their domestic staff, and the farmhands who cultivated the surrounding fields and greenhouses. Exhibitions are on view in the second-floor galleries.