Attr. Lilian Hale (1880 - 1963) Portrait of a young woman in a kimono. Possibly Agnes Dogget. Oil on canvas laid on board. Sight Size: 29 x 23 in. Overall Size: 35 x 29.25 in. Unsigned. Hale attended the Hartford Art School in Connecticut where her talents were noticed by William Merritt Chase, one of the country's renowned Impressionists, who proved to be her major influence. She attended Chase's summer school at Shinnecock, Long Island, and in 1900, having earned a scholarship from the Hartford Art Society, she began classes at the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts*. She was a student of Edmund Tarbell and Philip Leslie Hale, whom she married in 1902. After graduating from the Museum School in 1904 and a trip to Europe, she began annual exhibitions in Boston and received wide acclaim for the beauty of her figure and still life paintings and the quality of their draftsmanship and drawing. The birth of her daughter, Anna Westcott Hale, in 1908 caused her to give up her Boston Fenway Studio where she had worked with leading artists including Frank Benson, Joseph De Camp, her husband, and sometimes John Singer Sargent. In 1910, she won the Bronze Medal at the Buenos Aires Exposition and the Gold Medal at the Pan-Pacific Exposition in 1915. She continued to exhibit widely, and in the 1920s gained the attention of Duncan Phillips, a major patron of the arts who created The Phillips Museum in Washington D.C. She also gained many portrait clients and was elected a member of the National Association of Portrait Painters*. In 1927, she won the prestigious Altman Prize* at the National Academy of Design* for her Portrait of Taylor Hardin. The situation was unusual in two respects-- she was the first woman to win that prize, and the portrait was one of her few male subjects.