Martha Hale (1892-1984)

Portrait and figure painter Martha Hale was born in Kentucky in 1892. She studied at Sayre School, Lexington, Kentucky; the Cooper Union and the Art Students League, New York City; the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa; and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She also studied with modernist Southern landscape artist Will Henry Stevens, with painter Lois Bartlett Tracy, and with portrait, genre and figure painter Frank Stanley Herring in his Burnsville Painting Classes in Burnsville, North Carolina. Hale was head of the Art Department at Tennessee Wesleyan College, Athens, Tennessee from 1929 to 1966. She was a member of the Tennessee Art Association and the East Tennessee Art Association. Her work has been exhibited throughout Tennessee, and in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Nebraska, and Colorado, and has been awarded numerous prizes. Hale’s paintings can be seen in the Tennessee State Museum. The sitters in these companion portraits are the artist Edwin Lord Weeks and his wife, Francis Rollins Hale Weeks. Weeks was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1849, the son of affluent spice and tea merchants from Newton. Weeks became one of the most celebrated of American Orientalist painters. His subjects were derived from his frequent travels throughout the East, especially Morocco, Egypt, Israel, Syria, Turkey, Perisa, and India. Edwin married Frances Rollin Hale from New Hampshire, known as Fanny, in 1870. Weeks’ wife accompanied him on many of his journeys, during some of which they risked their lives venturing into areas in which few westerners were seen, surviving adverse conditions, and both once nearly dying from typhoid fever.