Lilly Martin Spencer

In a career that spanned the decades around the American Civil War (1860–1865), Lilly Martin Spencer created images of American middle-class domesticity inflected with ironic social comment.  Spencer was born Angelique Marie Martin in Exeter, England, to forward-thinking French intellectuals who supported abolitionism and the education of women. When she was eight, in 1830, the family immigrated to the United States and settled in rural Marietta, Ohio. Spencer early displayed artistic talent, and her father took her to Cincinnati to study with portrait painter John Insco Williams (1813–1873).  Her paintings attracted local acclaim and the attention of wealthy Cincinnati collector Nicholas Longworth, who proposed to finance her education in Europe. Ambitious American artists of the time often aspired to study abroad, but Spencer chose to remain in the United States, working under such artists as James Henry Beard (1812–1893), an established painter of animals and of genre scenes (scenes of everyday life), and amateur portrait painter William Althorpe Adams (1797–1878). Spencer's regional popularity grew and by 1842 she was accepting portrait commissions and exhibiting in local stores. Two years later, she married Benjamin Rush Spencer, an English immigrant tailor. The couple eventually had thirteen children, of whom seven lived to adulthood. Unable to maintain steady employment, Benjamin assisted his wife by managing the household, a highly unusual domestic arrangement for the period.

 Encouraged by her success in Cincinnati, in 1848 Spencer moved to New York City to take advantage of its thriving art market. She enrolled in evening drawing classes at the National Academy of Design, one of the nation's premier art schools, and in 1850 she was named an honorary member of the Academy, the highest recognition the institution then permitted women. To augment her income, she hand-colored lithographs while exhibiting her work at the Academy and in Washington, D.C., Boston, and Philadelphia. She began to sell her work through the Cosmopolitan Art Association, a New York-based organization that promoted the development of American painting. Spencer maintained an active presence in the New York art world while residing in nearby Newark, New Jersey, before settling in Highland, New York, on the Hudson River.

  Spencer made a considerable name for herself in Europe and America through her humorous images of domestic life, many of which were published as reproductive prints. In 1876, she exhibited at the Centennial Exposition, in Philadelphia. Although her detailed style and pointed moral themes soon were outdated, Spencer continued to paint until her death at the age of eighty.

  Thereafter, thanks both to her gender and to her topical subject matter, she was largely forgotten until 1978, when a retrospective exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Collection of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum), in Washington, D.C., marked a revival of interest in her work.  Today, respected as one of the leading genre painters of her time, Spencer is valued for her ability to capture the shifting gender roles and family politics of nineteenth-century American society.