Lilian Westcott Hale: Portrait of a Woman

Lilian Westcott Hale’s mentor Edmund Tarbell exclaimed after seeing her drawings in the one-woman 1908 Boston show, “Your drawings are perfectly beautiful—as fine as anything could be. They belong with our old friends Leonardo, Holbein and Ingres, and are to me the finest modern drawings I have ever seen” (Philip Hale Papers, Box 53a, Folder 1444, SSC) and William H. Downes wrote on January 22, 1908 in The Boston Transcript that her drawings were superior to the work of the most admired artists Paul Helleu and Charles Dana Gibson and that they had “a distinct elegance of style.” In fact, Lilian Westcott Hales drawings are considered more important than her oils because her drawings are poetically tender and…