McMullen Presentation Highlights New England Artists
The McMullen Museum of Art hosted its second virtual presentation of the year from its Into The Collection series on Feb. 25. McMullen manager Rachel Chamberlain and assistant director Diana Larsen led this event featuring New England artists.
Museum director and Boston College art history professor Nancy Netzer’s museum studies students prepared hypothetical exhibitions featuring pieces from the gallery’s collection. They examined five individual pieces, each student selecting their own painting of intrigue.
Larsen began the evening discussing painter Philip Leslie Hale. Hale studied art in Boston and New York before journeying to Paris in 1887, where he spent summers in Giverny with his good friend and fellow painter Theodore Earl Butler. Butler was also the son-in-law to Claude Monet, whose Impressionist landscape paintings influenced Hale’s own artistic style.
“His paintings exhibit the characteristic bright light and broken brushwork of French Impressionism as well as plein-air subject matter,” Larsen said.