Hayley Lever

Biography

In 1924 Hayley Lever was commissioned to paint a portrait of the presidential yacht Mayflower. The picture was presented to President Calvin Coolidge in the Cabinet Room of the White House. The Australian, who had arrived in New York twelve years earlier, was by then teaching at the Art Students League, and two years before had sat on the jury of the Carnegie International exhibition in Pittsburgh.

His work also took part in the art competitions of the 1928 and 1932 Olympic Games.

Richard Hayley Lever was born on 28 September 1876 (or, by other accounts, in 1875) in Bowden, South Australia, the son of Albion W. Lever. He studied drawing at Prince Alfred College under James Ashton and after leaving the college continued to study with him at his art school in Norwood. In 1892 he was among the first members of the Adelaide Easel Club. His maternal grandfather, Richard Hayley, owned the tannery in Bowden and died in 1882; the inheritance was enough for a journey to England in 1899.

Lever settled in St Ives, a fishing port and artists’ colony on the Cornish coast. The town owed its reputation as a centre of marine painting largely to Julius Olsson. Lever shared a studio with Frederick Judd Waugh and studied under the Impressionists Olsson and Algernon Talmage. He also painted in the French ports of Douarnenez and Concarneau in Brittany, across the Channel from St Ives. At the end of 1904 he went to Adelaide to his dying mother and stayed twelve months, holding exhibitions, painting the sea and teaching. In 1906, back in Europe, he married Aida Smith Gale in the parish church of St Ives. In 1908 he painted in Holland the series “Van Gogh’s Hospital”, which shows how strongly that artist had affected him.

In 1911 the Impressionist Ernest Lawson persuaded him to go to America, promising greater success there, and in 1912 Lever arrived in New York. He painted the Hudson, Times Square and Central Park, spent several summers running in Gloucester and worked at Marblehead. Both men, Lever and Lawson, painted boldly and quickly. Lawson brought him into his circle, to Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan and George Bellows, and Lever exhibited with them regularly, but in time he left New York for Massachusetts.

From 1919 to 1931 he taught classes at the Art Students League of New York, kept a studio in Gloucester and travelled to paint on Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard. He told his students that if he were confined to his own back yard for the rest of his life, he would still have more pictures in his head than time to paint them, and that art is simply knowing how to have a good time. I think these words can be believed: in his last years he lived almost like that.

By 1930 Lever had settled in Caldwell, New Jersey, and in 1938 he moved to Mount Vernon, New York. He painted seascapes and landscapes in New Jersey, New England and New York State, in Nova Scotia and on Grand Manan Island, in the Bahamas and in Florida, and often went back to Europe. In 1933 he became director of the Green Mountains summer art school at Stowe, Vermont, and in 1934–1935 he taught at the Forum School of Art in Bronxville.

Later, arthritis stiffened his right hand. He could no longer travel and turned to still lifes, and when the disease advanced he taught himself to paint with his left hand. After his wife’s death in 1949 Lever hardly left the house and went on working.

He died on 6 December 1958 at his home in Mount Vernon. The news surprised many: the public had not seen him for more than twenty years, though he had once been very popular and well received by the critics. Colleagues and dealers were at a loss when they found in his barn a large number of unsold and almost unseen works. His paintings are in the White House, the Hirshhorn Museum and the museums of Baltimore, Detroit, Brooklyn, Dallas, Los Angeles and Cincinnati, while the Art Gallery of South Australia holds a single one, “The Last Glow, St Ives Fishing Fleet”.