what I was writing my thesis on, here's a slightly abbreviated version of my proposal...Born in 1855 to a prominent and pious Boston family, Ellen Day Hale was one of thousands of girls who enrolled in art schools in the latter half of the nineteenth century. She was one of a handful of these girls who made art-making their lifelong profession. She lived through the American Civil War and the First World War, the 17th Amendment and the 19th Amendment, the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. She died in 1940 on the eve of a Second World War and the rise of Rosie the Riveter. Her life and artistic career straddled two centuries and two opposing feminine personas -- that of the “Ideal” Victorian Woman and of the “New” enfranchised twentieth century woman.
Hale was a prolific artist, who besides a number of less formal portraits and still-lives, amassed a large portfolio of etchings and earned several commissions to paint portraits of Washington, D.C.’s most prominent residents including the President and Vice-President. Today, Hale is best known for a handful of her paintings. However, during her lifetime, Hale was as well known, if not more celebrated for her etching. I believe it is her work as an etcher and her involvement in the painter-etcher movement of the late nineteenth century that offer the most new insights into Hale’s biography, and furthermore, offer insight into the position of women in the American artistic community.
In the late 19th century, women who sought economic independence through art-making benefited greatly from a burgeoning publishing industry that demanded illustrators and printers (wood engravers, lithographers, and photographers). As printmakers, women could enter the work force and earn an income without radically rebelling against societal norms. Many women, including Hale, sought formal education in painting and proceeded to have successful careers as painters, domestically and abroad. Hale and a number of these women would venture beyond the canvas to take part in the etching revival that migrated across the Atlantic from France and took hold in America in 1877. These women looked to etching not only for its commercial viability but also for its appeal as an alternative artistic outlet.
Before examining Hale’s turn to printmaking, it is important to understand the context under which she made this move. What was the etching revival, known as the painter-etcher movement? What was its impetus and who was at the forefront? What distinguished the painter-etchers from others who employed the printing technique? A number of important and influential American artists tried their hand at etching, including Mary Cassatt and James Abbott McNeil Whistler. Some gave up painting and centered their careers entirely on etchings. What was the appeal of medium to American artists like Whistler, Thomas Moran and Ellen Day Hale?
In 1887, hot off the heels of hosting the first major exhibition of etching in the US, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston opened the Exhibition of the Work of the Women Etchers. This 400+-work exhibit sought to carve out a place for women in the etching world while also further promoting the art form. Yet, in the same year, the New York Etching Club, the country’s most well-known etching club and the group that launched the etching revival in America, still only boasted one female on its membership roster. Only a few years earlier, art critic and author Mariana Griswold van Rensselaer called the painter-etchers “our men.” Additionally, the language critics employed to describe the revival’s artists echoes the rhetoric found in the speeches of Frederick Jackson Turner and President Theodore Roosevelt – rhetoric that ultimately characterized the American national identity as male. Thus, while printmaking might have been a traditionally female art form, the painter-etcher movement was decidedly male. The critics and exhibitions present conflicting views on the activeness of women in the painter-etcher movement and beg the question: what was the role of women in the etching revival of the 1880s and 1890s?
More specifically, what was Ellen Day Hale’s place within the painter-etcher movement? How much of her oeuvre is made up of etching and what were her motivations for exploring the medium? What does her biography and work tell us about the painter-etchers broadly speaking, and particularly, about the women painter-etchers? Finally, what does her long career as an artist – as a painter as well as an etcher -- tell us about Ellen Day Hale? Academics in the last decade have frequently invoked her life and work in discussions of women artists in ¬fin-de-siècle America, yet there seems to be little understanding of the character of the woman whose biography has made her an art historian’s artist. This is something I hope to remedy while also challenging earlier writings that establish 1907 as the end of Hale’s career.
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