An influential critic, writer and teacher, Philip Leslie Hale was an American Impressionist with an experimental, avant-garde approach to painting. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of author Edward Everett Hale and the younger brother of artist Ellen Day Hale, Philip was raised in a lively intellectual atmosphere. He probably received his first artistic training from his paternal aunt Susan Hale, after which he entered the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School under Edmund Tarbell, an American Impressionist painter who greatly influenced Hale’s style. A year later in 1884, the young artist moved to New York City, where he enrolled at the Art Students League and studied under Kenyon Cox and J. Alden Weir. There, his fellow students included Theodore Butler and William Howard “Peggy” Hart.

In 1887, Hale traveled to Paris with Theodore Butler and Susan Hale, where he furthered his artistic training at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and Académie Julian. During this first year, he studied with Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, Gustave Boulanger and Henri Lucien Doucet. In his spare time, he visited numerous galleries and museums, absorbing the developments of French Impressionism. The following summer of 1888, Hale visited Giverny for the first time, where he worked and socialized with American expatriates, including Theodore Robinson, John Leslie Breck, and Theodore Wendel. 

The Visit (The Fenway Studio) depicts Philip Leslie Hale's Boston studio, which adjoined that of his wife and fellow artist Lilian Westcott Hale within the Fenway Studios building. Still in operation today, the historic structure of 46 studios opened in 1905 and housed the workspaces of several other important Boston School artists, including Joseph DeCamp, William MacGregor Paxton, Lilla Cabot Perry and Edmund Tarbell. As Christine Temin of the Boston Globe describes, The Visit (The Fenway Studio) celebrates "the building where Hale painted it, a building dear to Boston's artists since its opening in 1905." (Boston Globe, May 28, 1998, p. F4)

This work has been praised since its exhibition at the Guild of Boston Artists in February 1919, when the Boston Evening Transcript reviewer W.H. Downes described: "The composition is novel and well invented. The poses of the two girls' figures, full of animation and gaiety, are plastic and free and graceful, without any hint of deliberate arrangement. There is an unusually attractive and natural movement of lines in the design..." ("Pictures by Philip L. Hale," Boston Evening Transcript, February 18, 1919, pt. 2, p. 15)