Still life
LILLY MARTIN SPENCER (1822–1902)
Still Life with Peaches, 1891
Oil on canvas, 28 1/4 x 18 in.
Signed and dated (at lower left): Lilly M. Spencer / Oct. / 1891
EXHIBITED: Keny Galleries, Columbus, Ohio, January 29–March 7, 2016, 150 Years of Ohio Still Life Painting, 1865–2015
EX COLL: private collection, Maine, by descent until 2014
While scholars have documented many Lilly Martin Spencer still-life works, combing references from the artist’s correspondence (made available by Spencer’s descendants to the Archives of American, Smithsonian Institution) as well as exhibition and auction records, as of 1973, when the National Collection of the Fine Arts mounted its Lilly Martin Spencer exhibition, none of the artist’s still-life paintings had been located. In one respect Spencer’s dedication to still life was hiding in plain sight. From the beginning of her career, still-life elements played an important part in her genre scenes. Three of Spencer’s best-known canvasses from the mid-1850s bear witness to the skill, gusto, and obvious delight manifest in Spencer’s still-life renditions. The cornucopia of food stuff spilling out of the marketing basket in The Young Husband: First Marketing (1856); and the variety of foodstuffs in Peeling Onions (1852), Shake Hands (1854), and Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ‘Lasses (1856) all attest to Spencer’s mastery of still life. Her strength as a still-life painter was duly noted by contemporary critics. In a generally scathing review of her work at the 1856 annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design, the only kind words the reviewer in the Ruskinian journal, The Crayon, found to say regarded Spencer’s still-life talents. Describing the artist as an “eminent ... painter of still life,” the reviewer wrote: “She paints still life with unsurpassed delicacy and force, with exquisite color both in tint and quality, and above all, works with entire freedom from artistic conventionalism” (May 1856, p. 146). In 1859, the Cosmopolitan Art Journal, the publication of the Cosmopolitan Art Association, noted that “In richness of tint and minuteness of touch, Mrs. Lily M. Spencer approaches the nearest to the genre of Preyer of any living artist.” (Johann Wilhelm Preyer [1803–1889] was a renowned German still-life painter.) In 1859, a sister of Reverend Henry Ward Beecher commissioned a painting of raspberries from Spencer. In 1881, Cyrus Butler, a founder of the Union League Club in New York, wrote to Spencer on club stationery, saying that “your ‘Strawberries and Roses’ are as fresh and beautiful as Nature’s own. If you could send more such to the Exhibitions, I am sure they would sell at once.”
Spencer did not commonly sign and date commissioned works, making identification problematic. The present painting offers a happy exception. Precisely dated October 1891, it appears to have been painted as an intended pair with Still Life with Apples (1891; formerly with Hirschl & Adler Galleries, now Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania), sharing canvas size and a similar compositional arrangement. Both portray ripe fruits still on their original branches set against dark tonal lightly textured backgrounds. The dark backgrounds and thicker application of paint reflect end-of-the-century taste. When Spencer moved to the Hudson Valley she began to incorporate landscape backgrounds into her work. These fruits, apples and peaches, are both commercially cultivated in the Poughkeepsie area. Spencer has set her fruit out of doors. Still attached to their original branch, the peaches are suspended over a wooden fence, hanging from the handle of what might have been a walking stick, whose lower portion remains hidden on the far side of the barrier. Though August is peak peach season in the Hudson Valley, Spencer’s peaches are perfect specimens. Her achievement in recreating with paint the tactile sensation of peach fuzz constitutes a true artistic tour de force. Spencer has attached a slim branch of purple asters to the peaches, tied to the fruit branch with a small blue ribbon. The aster, a traditional symbol of love, may be a reference to Benjamin Rush Spencer, who died in 1890 after forty-six years of marriage. Asters are late-summer bloomers, reaching their peak toward the end of the peach season in the Hudson Valley.