Winter Art Show

The arresting portrait at left is by an artist with impressive ancestry—Ellen Day Hale, descendant of Nathan Hale, daughter of Edward Everett Hale, and great-niece of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Born in Boston in 1855, Ellen Hale studied art there and in Paris, becoming known for her vivid colors and powerful execution. After 1904 she moved to Washington, D.C., where she sketched President Theodore Roosevelt. This confident young woman holding an ostrich fan is the artist herself, at age thirty.