Philip Leslie Hale (1865–1931) American, Impressive Oil on Canvas Figural Painting "Spirit of Night". Oil on canvas tasteful nude figural depicting Day and her sister, Night. Christies gallery label verso. Signed and titled verso.

This painting was exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in their 115th Annual Exhibition in 1920. It was illustrated in the catalogue for the exhibition (titled as “Day And Her Sister, Night”). 

A similar sized work of a woman with sea gulls brought $70,000 at Eldred's in 2004. 

Overall Size: 49 1/2 x 96 in.

Sight Size: 39 x 86 1/2 in.

Philip Leslie Hale (1865–1931) was a prominent American Impressionist painter, influential art critic, and dedicated teacher. Born into a distinguished Boston family—his father was the renowned minister and author Edward Everett Hale—he studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Art Students League in New York, and furthered his training in Paris at the École des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian beginning in 1887. During summers at Giverny, he absorbed Claude Monet’s light-filled palette and loose brushwork, later applying these Impressionist techniques to garden scenes and figure compositions featuring women in luminous settings. From 1893 until his death, Hale taught at the Boston Museum School and also instructed at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum, while writing art criticism and authoring the first American monograph on Vermeer in 1913. A central figure in the Boston School of painting, he married fellow artist Lilian Westcott Hale in 1902 and left a lasting legacy as both a creator and a mediator of Impressionism in the United States.