Hayley Lever as a Watercolorist

Hayley Lever (1876-1958)
Fishing Wharf, Marblehead, MA, ca. 1924
Watercolor on paper, 17 1/2 x 22 in. Monday, September 28th, marks the birthday of Hayley Lever (1876-1958), an Australian-American artist I had the pleasure of writing about, on behalf of Spanierman Gallery, in 2003. Born in Bowden Tannery, a suburb of Adelaide, he was christened Richard, but as a professional artist he preferred to use his second and last names only. I had conducted research on this talented painter on numerous occasions in the past, but the opportunity to do a book-length publication allowed me to examine all facets of Lever’s oeuvre––from the marines and urban scenes he produced in England and France during the early 1900s to the portrayals of New York City, New Jersey, upstate New York and coastal Massachusetts created after his move to the United States in 1912. His paintings are very personal, reflecting his belief that “art is the re-creation of mood in line, form and color,” but they were informed by styles such as impressionism and post-impressionism, including the bold aesthetic of Vincent van Gogh. In fact, it was Lever’s deft combination of realism, modernism and his own subjective vision that contributed to his popularity with collectors such as Duncan Phillips.

Hayley Lever (1876-1958)
St. Ives, Cornwall
Watercolor on paper
9 1/2 x 13 1/2 in.Lever was a skilled easel painter who could wield his brush with verve and gusto and he was equally comfortable with pen, ink and graphite. In studying his work, I was especially impressed by his facility with watercolor, a medium he used with regularity throughout his career. His one-man shows at museum venues such as the Corcoran Gallery of Art typically included watercolors, which tells me that he considered them just as important as his oils. Lever was drawn to watercolor’s transparent, light-reflecting quality and its portability––the latter being particularly relevant for an artist who typically spent his summers painting by the sea. Most importantly, though, Lever found watercolor an ideal means of creating a spontaneous work of art; in his words, watercolor was “inspirational, immediate, [and] impressionistic.” His penchant for simplified shapes and the way he would use color to create volume and mass attracted the attention of many contemporary commentators, among them Henry Tyrell, who linked him with a new generation of watercolorists that included progressive painters such as John Marin and Charles Demuth; as Tyrell put it in 1921, Lever was an “eager innovator . . . [whose] aquarelle no less than his oil paintings gains in stirring vitality with each successive season.”


Hayley Lever (1876-1958)
Still Life with Apples on a Chinese Plate, 1930
Watercolor on paper, 14 x 19-1/4The “vitality” that Tyrell referred to can be seen in the selection of Lever watercolors on display at Spanierman Gallery as part of the exhibition Five American Watercolorists, which runs through October 31st. In addition to depictions of the boats, wharves and coastlines that played such as prominent role in Lever’s art, he is also represented by a Vermont landscape, some early and very evocative views of St. Ives (see above right) and a very sumptuous still life (above left).

Carol Lowrey 

For a comprehensive study of Hayley Lever’s life and art, see Carol Lowrey, Hayley Lever (1876-1958), preface by Marte Previti, (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2003).