BIOGRAPHY

Education and Training
Philadelphia School of Industrial Arts (University of the Arts), Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, night school, 1939-1941, 1957-1959
Fleisher Memorial, Graphic Sketch Club, 1939-1941
Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1948-1949
Apprentice toolmaker

Teachers and Influences
Influenced by the Great Dutch Masters, Vermeer and Rembrandt, as well as the Italian Renaissance, and French and English painters.

Connection to Bucks County
Joseph Crilley first came to Bucks County in 1935 as a boy scout from Philadelphia to go camping at Bowman's Hill near New Hope.

At that time he said that he would one day live in Bucks County. True to his word, he moved to New Hope in 1948, and remains a Bucks County resident.

Colleagues and Affiliations
Ranulph Bye, Vincent Ceglia, James Wolfe, Jack Rosen, Harry Rosin, Harry Haenigsen, John Folinsbee, Harry Leith-Ross, and Walter Baum.

Crilley taught art at the New Hope-Solebury High School, where he developed the yearbook into a work of art and inspired his students to produce an anti-establishment satire People Please!

He is known locally for his realistic paintings of houses and yards in the New Hope-Lambertville area.

An avid fisherman, he wrote articles for The Lambertville Beacon from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, and has depicted the annual shad fishing in Lambertville in several of his paintings.