Josephine Hale, born Josephine Adeline Bruneau, was the eleventh child born to French Canadian parents who emigrated to the American territory of South Dakota, amid a tide of settlement on the traditional homelands of the Indigenous Dakota Peoples. After J. Hale graduated from Sioux Point High School, she moved with her family to Great Falls, Montana. While working as a schoolteacher, she met and married Walter Hale, whose untimely death in 1904 left her in possession of several properties. J. Hale proved a deft manager of her late husband’s assets, securing the means to help her family and venture a voluntary deployment with the Red Cross in 1917 during World War One. We can only guess at the motivations that prompted this generous impulse; what opportunity or obligation she felt as she set forth at the age of forty, having misrepresented her age and paid her own passage to assure her place in the war effort.

J. Hale’s command of the French language placed her in the service and company of European soldiers, an arrangement that proved an endearing novelty for each side. Her popularity was far-reaching, built upon the solid foundation of her prior acumen, inexhaustible work ethic and oft-remarked predisposition for kindness and stability. After the war, she extended her visa, completing a nursing education while assisting in reconstruction efforts. It was during this relatively calm period that she met George Hepburn Robertson and the two began an enduring relationship that impacted her trajectory thereafter.

Her brief return to Montana in 1924 presented an altered picture to friends, relatives and strangers, all struck by the many outward signs of her European tour. She returned with a self-possession born of her many accomplishments, a burgeoning Parisian feminism and, we may imagine, in the glow of her new love. Such sensations could find no nourishment in the Great Falls of 1924 and J. Hale contrived a return to Paris in 1926 at the age of forty-eight, this time as a student of painting at the Académie Delécluse.

The next nine years were to be, in her words, the happiest of her life. Art became a motive for traveling, a way to know people, and a means of observing the world around her. J. Hale’s reams of notated sketchbooks and canvases often painted en plein air on both sides show that the act of making art itself is what became essential in her late onset creative flourishing. J. Hale’s artworks are a synthesises of her academic training, artistic influences including French Impressionism, and a strong personal sense of light and colour that gives her paintings a vital specificity.
J. Hale’s artistic assent was curtailed at its zenith in 1934, the year of her inclusion in the prestigious Salon des artistes français, by the rise of the Third Reich in Germany and the subsequent destabilisation of Europe, forcing her return to America. Upon her return to Great Falls, the Charles M. Russel Chapter of the American Artists Professional League hosted a solo show of her paintings.

With war abroad, an economic downturn at home and the internal encroachment of arthritis and poor health, J. Hale’s painting slowed as her responsibilities turned to the care of aging siblings and another stint of voluntary nursing service at Columbus Hospitalin 1942. Despite the all-consuming demands on her abilities and time, she managed several painting trips to Glacier National Park, the Missouri River, Arizona, California and Mexico. Her works depict the subjects of her care, often created as gifts, and the landscapes we can imagine as reprieves from her labours. J. Hale died in Great Falls, aged 83 in 1961, from leukaemia.