HAYLEY LEVER (1876-1958)

Hayley Lever's exceptional career path took him from the shores of his native Australia to those of England, and then the United States.
Hayley Lever was born on September 28, 1875 in Bowden Tannery, a suburb of Adelaide, Australia
Lever attended Adelaide's Prince Alfred College from 1883 to 1891, during which time he received drawing lessons from the marine painter, James Ashton. As a boy, he loved to watch incoming clipper ships at the port of Adelaide, an experience that influenced his later penchant for maritime themes. Upon graduating from Prince Alfred College, he took classes with Ashton at the Norwood Art School and later attended Ashton's Academy of Art in Adelaide. During these years, Lever spent his free time painting and sketching in the local countryside, exhibiting his work at the Adelaide Easel Club and at other local venues. His interest in painting outdoors was likely influenced, to some extent, by the achievements of artists such as Tom Roberts, Charles Conder and other painters of the so-called "Heidelberg School," who introduced the tenets of Impressionism and pleinairism to Australian art during the late 1880s and early 1890s.

Hayley Lever made his American debut in 1910, when he exhibited his Port of St. Ives, Cornwall, at the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh by special invitation. He participated in the 1911 annual as well, and was so encouraged by the positive response to his work that he traveled to New York in 1912 and went on to settle there permanently. The timing of his move to America was propitious: Impressionism, the dominant aesthetic of the previous two decades, was on the decline, and the once-shocking urban realism of the Ashcan School had become part of the mainstream.
In 1919, Lever joined the faculty of the Art Students League of New York, where he provided painting instruction until 1931. Around 1930, he moved to Caldwell, New Jersey, but he continued to maintain a New York studio and teach Saturday art classes. Although he continued to win recognition in the national annuals, including the National Academy's of Design's Edwin Palmer Memorial Prize (1936, 1938), sales of his work were minimal due to the sluggish art market. He subsequently supplemented his income by teaching, serving as director of the Art Students League's Green Mountain Summer Art School in Stowe, Vermont in 1933 and teaching painting classes at the Forum School of Art in Bronxville, New York during 1934-35. In 1938, after losing his home in Caldwell, he moved to Mount Vernon, New York, where he became the director of the Studio Art Club. Consistent with his temperamental personality and the personal problems that plagued him later in life, his work took on more expressionistic overtones as he replaced the graceful lines and controlled touch of the previous years with agitated brushwork and an electric palette, often injecting strong light-dark contrasts into his paintings to create powerful visual statements; some of Lever's later paintings go beyond mere representation into the realm of fantasy and the symbolic.

In 1940, Hayley Lever traveled to Nova Scotia and Grand Manan Island, Canada, but his extended trips to coastal New England became fewer and fewer. He continued to paint scenes of industrial and maritime life in New York, New Jersey and Long Island; however, as the years went by he turned increasingly to still-life subjects, especially when debilitating arthritis prevented further travel. As his illness progressed, Lever even learned to paint with his left hand.

Examples of Lever's work can be found in major collections throughout the United States, including the Dallas Museum of Art; the Flint Institute of Arts, Michigan; the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; the Nantucket Historical Association, Massachusetts; the New Britain Museum of Art, Connecticut; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the National Academy of Design, New York; the National Arts Club, New York; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut.