The Visit (The Fenway Studio)

The present work depicts Philip Leslie Hale's Boston studio, which adjoined that of his wife and fellow artist Lilian Westcott Hale within the Fenway Studios building. Still in operation today, the historic structure of 46 studios opened in 1905 and housed the workspaces of several other important Boston School artists, including Joseph DeCamp, William MacGregor Paxton, Lilla Cabot Perry and Edmund Tarbell. As Christine Temin of the Boston Globe describes, The Visit (The Fenway Studio) celebrates "the building where Hale painted it, a building dear to Boston's artists since its opening in 1905." (Boston Globe, May 28, 1998, p. F4)

The present work has been praised since its exhibition at the Guild of Boston Artists in February 1919, when the Boston Evening Transcript reviewer W.H. Downes described: "The composition is novel and well invented. The poses of the two girls' figures, full of animation and gaiety, are plastic and free and graceful, without any hint of deliberate arrangement. There is an unusually attractive and natural movement of lines in the design..." ("Pictures by Philip L. Hale," Boston Evening Transcript, February 18, 1919, pt. 2, p. 15)