Josephine Adeline Hale
1878-1961

"That's the way to die: alive all through!"

When Josephine Hale joked with Reverend Robert Putsch in 1961, she was eighty-three years old and had lead a full life as an artist and a nurse. Born in 1878 in Sioux Point, South Dakota, the youngest of eleven children, she spent most of her childhood in Canada before returning to the United States to attend Commercial High School. After graduating, she moved to Great Falls, Montana; she discovered a need for teachers, achieved her teaching certification, and began to teach in a country school just outside of Great Falls. She met Walter G. Hale, who had taken up ranching in hopes that outdoor work and fresh air would cure his tuberculosis. However, two years after their marriage, Walter died.

Although Josephine owned the ranch for fifty-five years, she left it in the hands of renters in order to respond to the needs of others. Her caring personality eventually lead her to join the Red Cross, as the first woman volunteer, in 1917. Josephine's concern over the fact that everyone in her family was too old to serve in the war, and her sympathy for the Allies (her maiden name was Bruneau), caused her to "mis-compute" her age from forty to thirty-five and to pay all her traveling expenses in order to carry out her mission to serve. She wrote in her diary: "I am probably the only one of the 1500 passengers who had to pay the $102 for my ticket to Europe." After the war, Josephine extended her passport for four years in order to continue to help the people she regarded as her "dear friends." For her service she received the Medaille Reconnaissance from the French Government.

When Josephine returned to Great Falls, she found her family well and busy and her ranch in capable hands; she decided to follow her own career. As a result, she traveled to Boston to study interior design. However, her interior design professors encouraged her to study painting, so she decided to return to Paris. In 1921, in her fifties, Josephine enrolled at the Academy Delecluse and studied with Auguste and Eugene Delecluse and Courman and Laurens. She records her years of study in Paris as the "happiest years of my life." In 1934, her painting "Marche Douarnenez, Market Scene in Brittany," was chosen for exhibition in the Paris Salon. In her excitement, Josephine sent twenty-six paintings home to Great Falls, writing: "I regret that the subjects are not of home. I have tried, however, to choose the next best place, Brittany, the 'Paradise of Painters.'"

The onset of World War II, brought Josephine home, where she responded to the Air Force's call for nurses. When the war ended, Josephine's reputation for healing brought more patients to her doorstep. As a result, her studio, with the sunroof installed by a friend, became neglected. Invitations received from the National Association of Women Painters and Sculptors and the American Artists Professional League were carefully set aside in a drawer. Josephine continued to paint in spurts; trips to Arizona and Glacier National Park inspired vivid flower and landscape paintings. Shaky hands and bad health resulting from leukemia limited her efforts.

Known affectionately as "Aunt Josephine" by her family and friends, she joked a few days before her death: "You are all being so good to me that I may yet die of old age."

--(Interpreted by Hannah Lohmuller from Vivian Ellis's notes)

Directory of Paintings by Josephine Hale