For much of his career Richard Francis Lahey was an educator; he considered himself a teacher of art rather than an artist who teaches. His strategy was to use demonstrations to excite his students and to encourage them to work on their own. Lahey painted a variety of subjects—landscapes, still lifes, and figure studies—in both traditional and abstracted styles.
Lahey was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. From 1913 to 1917 he studied at the Art Students League in New York City where one of his instructors was Robert Henri—a leading figure of the Ashcan School. Like many members of that movement, Lahey began his career as a freelance illustrator, creating cartoons for the New York World Sunday magazine and the New York Times, often doing caricatures of celebrities like John Barrymore and Eddie Cantor. He was a proficient etcher and lithographer who depicted contemporary life. For eighteen months during World War I he was in Washington, DC, and overseas working for the United States Navy producing camouflage designs. Throughout most of the 1920s he spent summer vacations abroad, visiting France, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
In 1921 Lahey joined the faculty of the Minneapolis School of Art in Minnesota (now the Minneapolis College of Art and Design). Two years later he was back at the League, where he remained as an instructor until 1935. In 1932 he submitted three works in the Summer Olympics Art Competition, a part of the modern Olympic Games from 1912 to 1948. That year the categories under painting were painting (oils), prints, and watercolors / drawings, and he submitted a work in each category. Under the auspices of the Section of Fine Arts department of the Works Progress Administration, in 1936 he painted a mural entitled Showing the People in the Early Days Transferring from Stagecoach to Boat along the Monongahela River for the post office in Brownsville, Pennsylvania. That same year, he became the principal at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, a position he held until 1963. He also joined the faculty at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, teaching and or lecturing there once a week for twenty-three years alongside his wife Carlotta (Alma) Gonzales, a sculptor, and fellow artist Clare Leighton.
In 1940 the Laheys purchased a mid-18th century home in the woods of Vienna, Virginia. They removed a wood-framed kitchen addition, replacing it with brick, and used the original wooden kitchen as a stand-alone art studio. In 1960 he and his wife undertook a mural assignment for the American Battle Monuments Commission at the Hawaii Memorial in Honolulu, which they completed in 1964. At the instigation of Lamar Dodd, an early student of Lahey’s at the League, the Georgia Museum of Art in Athens mounted a retrospective of his work in 1963; five years later Lahey returned to teach at the university. Although the murals no longer stand, Lahey’s home and 22 acres of natural land in Virginia, known as Lahey Lost Valley, has been preserved through Fairfax County Parks Authority as bequeathed by Carlotta after Richard’s passing.