WILLIAM MATTHEW HALE, RWA RWS (1837-1929)
William Matthew Hale was born in Bristol on 27 August 1837, the son of the Reverend William Hale. He was educated at Bath Grammar School, Rugby and Balliol College, Oxford. He read for a year with a conveyancer with a view to becoming a barrister, but then followed his own desire to paint professionally. Though he studied art under James Duffield Harding and William Collingwood Smith, he went on to produce landscapes and seascapes which synthesised the approaches of J M W Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. He worked widely in Britain and abroad, including Norway and Spain.
He exhibited at the Royal Academy, the Royal Society of British Artists and, especially, the New Society of Painters in Water-Colours. He was elected an associate of the New Society in 1871 and a full member a decade later (the society was renamed as the Royal Institute of Painters in Water-Colours in
1883). He was also a member of Royal West of England Academy and the Bristol Savages. He died on 7 March 1929. His genealogy of The Family of Hale was posthmously published in 1936.
