Richard Hayley Lever

(1876-1958)

Richard Hayley Lever was born in Adelaide, Australia, and arrived in America in 1911, where he studied art in New York City and exhibited his individualistic Impressionist paintings of Manhattan in local galleries.

The colors in Vincent Van Gogh's strong paintings were an inspiration for Lever's landscape and still life canvases, many of which he created during the summer months while maintaining a studio in Gloucester. Lever's travels in the Cornwall section of England in 1893 were an artistic reminder when he painted on Cape Ann, and when back in New York City where he taught at the Art Students League from 1919 to 1931. In the summer of 1928 Haley Lever was painting in Nantucket wearing his blue Brittany fisherman's jacket, and an island newspaper reporter wrote in August that the "Noted Marine Painter is here." He later became director of the Studio Art Club in Mount Vernon, New York, where he passed away in 1958.

Mood in line, plus form and color, were essential in Hayley Lever's paintings, and he told his students that art should be about having a good time. Lever had a very good time when he received prizes and critical acclaim for his works, examples of which are now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and in the Phillips Collection and the Corcoran Gallery in the nation's capitol.

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