Hendricks A. Hallett (1847-1921)

“[I try to] reproduce the impression that [a scene] makes on me as nearly as I can.”

- Hendricks A. Hallett 

 

Hendricks Hallett is primarily known as a marine painter and found plenty to inspire him around Boston Harbor, as well as along the North Shore of Massachusetts up to Marblehead, and in Maine at Bar Harbor and Mount Desert Island. He was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and despite showing an interest in art at an early age, his father persuaded him to pursue a career in business. However, in 1874, at the age of twenty-seven, he left Boston for Antwerp and Paris to study painting. When he returned, he launched his professional art career in Boston, listing himself as a marine painting in the 1877 City Directory with a studio at 42 Court Street. In 1899, he moved to the Studio Building on Tremont Street, and when it tragically burned down in 1906, Hallett relocated again, this time to the recently-opened Fenway Studios on Ipswich Street in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.

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References: Arthur Chamberlain, “Some Boston Artists, W. L. Dean, Hendricks Hallett,” The Art Interchange 45, no. 3 (Sept 1900): 58; Falk, Who Was Who in American Art; Vose Galleries archives.

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Beginning around 1906, he also made sketching trips to the coast of England. Hallett exhibited his oils and watercolors regularly at the Boston Art Club, and also participated in exhibitions at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association.Hallett sketched outdoors with pencil and paper, making color notes and memoranda to himself for reference, before translating these first impressions into larger oil paintings in his studio. Although he worked in a very traditional manner, he was touched by the sense of immediacy when painting on site.