Hayley Lever On Sale

Hayley Lever arrived in England at the turn of the century and worked and studied for a few years before settling down in the Cornwall village of St. Ives, a picturesque fishing port in southern England. He became an essential member of the artist's colony and produced an extensive body of work, predominantly fishing vessels, marines, seascapes, and port scenes. A prolific artist, Lever submitted his work to competitions in England, France, and even to America, receiving several prestigious awards. He also traveled to various countries in Europe, sketching wherever he went. Many of his most compelling works were done in the south of England and the port villages of Douarnenez and Concarneau in Brittany, directly across the English Channel from St. Ives. American artists occasionally visited St. Ives and Lever befriended Ernest Lawson, who greatly admired his work. Lawson persuaded Lever to emigrate to America, and he arrived in New York in 1912 with his family. Lever soon discovered the New England coast, where he began to paint the fishing fleets of Gloucester and the elegant yachts of Marblehead, producing scenes that became popular in the New York art market. Major galleries such as William Macbeth, Ferargil, and Daniel and Rehn gave him exhibitions, and he continued to gather awards including a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, in 1915. The National Arts Club honored him with a life membership, and he was elected as a member of the National Academy. From 1919–31, Lever taught life classes and still life painting at the Art Students' League of New York. He also maintained a summer studio in Gloucester in the 1920s from which he traveled to Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and the Canadian maritime provinces, producing many spectacular marines. Lever's paintings and watercolors are in numerous museum collections throughout the United States, Europe, and Australia, including the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Phillips Memorial Gallery in Washington, DC, and the Sydney Art Gallery, in Australia.

Emerging in 19th-century France, Impressionist art embraced loose brushwork and plein-air painting to respond to the movement of daily life. Although the pioneers of the Impressionist movement — Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Paul Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir — are now household names, their work was a radical break with an art scene led and shaped by academic traditions for around two centuries. These academies had oversight of a curriculum that emphasized formal drawing, painting and sculpting techniques and historical themes.

The French Impressionists were influenced by a group of artists known as the Barbizon School, who painted what they witnessed in nature. The rejection of pieces by these artists and the later Impressionists from the salons culminated in a watershed 1874 exhibition in Paris that was staged outside of the juried systems. After a work of Monet’s was derided by a critic as an unfinished “impression,” the term was taken as a celebration of their shared interest in capturing fleeting moments as subject matter, whether the shifting weather on rural landscapes or the frenzy of an urban crowd. Rather than the exacting realism of the academic tradition, Impressionist paintings, sculptures, prints and drawings represented how an artist saw a world in motion.

Many Impressionist painters were inspired by the perspectives in imported Japanese prints alongside these shifts in European painting — Édouard Manet drew on ukiyo-e woodblock prints and depicted Japanese design in his Portrait of Émile Zola, for example. American artists such as Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase, who studied abroad, were impacted by the work of the French artists, and by the late 19th century American Impressionism had its own distinct aesthetics with painters responding to the rapid modernization of cities through quickly created works that were vivid with color and light.

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