Sam Haile (1909-1948)

Haile emigrated to America at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. Many of his paintings were lost or destroyed during this move, and others in a fatal car accident that the artist suffered in Dartington in 1948, at the age of just thirty-eight. Further works perished in a fire that broke out at the pottery of Haile's widow, Marianne De Trey, in 1957. A total of only twelve canvases by the artist remain today, with over half of them already forming part of museum collections.

Known chiefly as one of the outstanding potters of his generation, De Trey remarked that Haile always considered himself a painter. She said that he had an uneven disposition and seemed to oscillate between the guise of a gently decorative potter and a rabid surrealist. He taught ceramics at Hammersmith School of Art during the day, while through the night, as a lifelong insomniac, he immersed himself in surreal painting sessions. Although few of Haile's Surrealist paintings and drawings were ever shown to the public during his lifetime, the artist's work has posthumously appeared in most major Surrealist surveys in Britain, including the 1978 'Dada and Surrealism' exhibition at the Hayward Gallery.

The work that survives from Haile's short life bears testament to his unique and unflinching vision. Writing in 1967, in the foreword to a travelling exhibition of Haile's work organised by the Manchester Institute of Contemporary Art, Charles Seward wrote that of all the British Surrealists, the 'contribution of Sam Haile must be seen as among its rarest and most moving achievements'. The leading authority on British Surrealism, Michel Remy, called Haile 'the most thoroughgoing surrealist in Britain'. He continued to say that he was 'a painter who constantly avoided any form of imitation of Continental surrealism and remained uncompromisingly original'.