The peripatetic painter and printmaker Ellen Day Hale lived on both coasts of the United States, spent time in Western Europe, and visited the Middle East. She was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, the only daughter of the noted orator and author Edward Everett Hale and Emily Baldwin Perkins. Hale's great-great-uncle was the Revolutionary War patriot Nathan Hale; her great-aunt Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin; her brother Philip and his wife, Lilian Westcott Hale, were both professional painters, as was her aunt Susan Hale, a well-known art lecturer who was also Ellen's first drawing teacher.

Hale also found a number of female role models among her painter friends, most notably Helen Knowlton, with whom she studied from 1874 to 1877, and Gabrielle de Veaux Clements, from whom she learned the technique of etching. Hale never married but helped raise her seven younger brothers and then, because her mother had become an invalid, acted as hostess for her father when he served as chaplain to the U.S. Senate in Washington, D.C., between 1904 and his death in 1909.

Hale studied art in Boston with William Morris Hunt, a Paris-trained painter who encouraged his pupils to work in Europe. She also took classes at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts but was more influenced by her experiences in France at the Académie Colarossi and, especially, the Académie Julian, where she was a pupil in 1882 and again in 1885. Hale began exhibiting her work in 1878 at the Boston Art Club; her pictures were also displayed at the Royal Academy in London, the Paris Salon, and at important venues in Philadelphia and Chicago. Hale supplemented her income by teaching but did not settle down in one place until she was nearly 50. She continued painting well into her 80s.