By Hayley Lever
Located in New York, NY
Hayley Lever (1876 - 1958)
Concarneau, Brittany, France, 1905
Oil on panel
6 3/4 x 9 1/2 inches
Signed by the artist lower left
Inscribed by another hand on the reverse
Provenance:
Clayton-Liberatore Galleries, Bridgehampton, New York
Hayley Lever’s (1875-1958) versatility has worked against his posthumous reputation. He was never associated with a single artistic movement, instead producing impressionist, post-impressionist, and expressionist works. While best known as a painter of post-impressionist marine scenes, his subject matter included landscapes, urban scenes, and still lifes across his 60-year career. This lack of a singular style or subject has given him an amorphous place in U.S. art history despite his obvious accomplishments.
[Richard] Hayley Lever was born in Bowden, South Australia in 1875. He excelled in painting classes at Prince Alfred College (1883-91) and Norwood Art School (1891-93) in Adelaide. In the 1890s, Lever moved to England, studying art in London and painting at St. Ives, a fishing port and popular artistic colony on the Cornish coast. In St. Ives, Lever shared a studio with Frederick Waugh, and studied painting with Albert Julius Olsson and Algernon Talmage.
Lever was a plein air painter particularly interested in the effect of sunlight on the sea. He painted in a distinctive style, strongly influenced by the works of Vincent van Gogh, that might now be called post-impressionism. He used a limited palette to paint the St. Ives harbor, particularly at dusk or in the moonlight. His strong contrasting colors and thick use of paint created a crisp and physical surface that earned him acclaim in Europe. Lever’s many St. Ives seascapes are among his most popular works. In 2017, his painting entitled “The Old Lighthouse and Fleets of St. Ives” sold at auction for $162,500.
In 1912, Lever moved to New York to test the art market in the United States. In Manhattan, Lever met prominent U.S. painters such as Ernest Lawson, Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan, and George Bellows. Lever exhibited with this group regularly in New York City, painting parks, streets, bridges and the Manhattan waterfront. However, he soon discovered the scenic potential of Gloucester, Rockport, and Marblehead in the Cape Ann area of Massachusetts...
Category
Early 1900s American Impressionist CHUCK MAULDIN Art
