An introduction to the art of Richard Hayley Lever who features in Country Life this week
Though born and raised in Australia, Richard Hayley Lever is often termed an American artist, largely due to the great success he enjoyed there in his later career after he settled in New York.
Nevertheless, Lever’s formative training was at Prince Alfred College, Adelaide with seascape painter, James Ashton, whose son, Will, he was later to befriend in St. Ives. In 1894, a small legacy from his grandfather enabled him to travel to Paris, where he studied the human figure under Rene-Francois-Xavier Prinet. However, Lever’s natural inclination was towards plein-air and marine subjects, so by 1902, he moved to St Ives, where Julius Olsson and Louis Munro Grier had established The St Ives School of Marine and Landscape Painting, partially in response to young artists, like Lever, who landed in droves in Cornwall, in hopes of finding the training in these genres they had been unable to get London. The school’s emphasis on plein-air work suited Lever’s artistic ambitions, and he rapidly refined his technique and approach to seascape and landscape subjects under the instruction of Olsson and Algernon Talmage.
Lever became friends with both Olsson and Grier, even organising cricket games with them and Will Ashton, a fellow student. But while Lever was considered part of the St Ives artistic community, he remained somewhat apart from them in his artistic sensibilities, which were decidedly French. His early views of Concarneau, Dieppe and Honfleur, are painted in in visible brushstrokes, impasto, and tonalities that recall the work of Monet and Pissaro. What is interesting about the present work is that, while it could have been painted before 1904-5, just before Lever travelled back to Australia, or around 1906, when he had returned to St. Ives, it hints at the, as yet, untapped affinity for the more gestural, colouristic aspects of Post-Impressionism that would later take over his work. The catalyst for his shift in style was a 1908 trip to Holland where he first encountered Van Gogh’s work. Lever made a series of paintings entitled, Van Gogh's Hospital, Holland in homage to the profound influence this artist had exercised on his own creative imagination. From this point on, Lever’s work subsequently became bolder in handling, palette and composition, eventually developing a highly decorative post-Impressionism style that would later strongly appeal to his American clientele.
To see a wide selection of works available by Richard Hayley Lever, Julius Olsson and their St. Ives contemporaries visit www.messums.com
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