Lilly Martin Spencer was a professional artist for over sixty years, painting portraits, still lifes, miniatures, and genre scenes. In the 1850s to mid-1860s her genre scenes depicting domestic topics were engraved for wide distribution, spreading her name and fame, and putting her forward as an American claimant to the rich tradition of European genre, especially the Dutch and English schools whose prints graced parlor walls all over the North American continent. Spencer’s genre paintings remain her best remembered work to this day. Generally sunny, bordering sentimental, they conjure the popular image of antebellum American life, the nostalgic mythology of the last decades of a cultural optimism and innocence that ended (if it ever existed) with the Civil War. Spencer’s own story, however, is considerably more nuanced than this snapshot of her career.
In 1850, Angélique LePetite Martin, wrote to her daughter, a married woman in New York City juggling two young children and a full-time career, urging her to attend a women’s rights meeting in Worcester, Massachusetts. Lilly Martin Spencer responded:
My time dear mother to enable me to succeed in my painting is so entirely engrossed by it, that I am not at all able to give my attention to anything else.... You know dear Mother that that is your point of exertion and attention and study like my painting is mine, and you know dear Mother as you have told me many a time that if we wish to become great in any one thing, we must condense our powers to one point (as quoted in Elsie F. Freivogel, “Lilly Martin Spencer,”Archives of American Art Journal [Smithsonian Institution], vol. 12, no. 4, 1972, p. 9).
This exchange between mother and daughter succinctly captures the twin poles of Lilly Martin Spencer’s identity: the sure sense of her own powers instilled in her as a child and the determination to succeed as an artist that was the motivating force of her adult life.
Lilly Martin’s parents were French émigrés, moving from Brittany to Exeter, England (where Angélique Marie Martin, always called Lilly, was born), to America, and finally, driven by the 1832 cholera epidemic in New York City, to Marietta, Ohio. Marietta (named for Marie Antoinette) was the first permanent settlement in the Old Northwest Territory. Located in southeast Ohio where the Muskingum River flows into the Ohio on the Virginia (now West Virginia) border, when the Martins arrived, the surrounding area had a history of French settlement. The town itself was pleasantly situated with an academy (now Marietta College) where Gilles Martin could pursue his profession as a French language teacher. The Martins purchased land five miles out of town suitable to build a house and farm. Lilly, her two older brothers and a sister born in New York worked on the family farm and were educated at home, dipping into their parents’ well-stocked library of classical literature, history and philosophy.
As a child Lilly displayed a natural talent for drawing. Encouraged by her parents, she filled the walls of the family house with charcoal drawings. After a descriptive article in the Marietta Intelligencer in September 1839, the house became something of a local attraction. Lilly began to study in earnest with nearby artists, Sala Bosworth and Charles Sullivan. In August 1841, when she was nineteen years old, she had a solo show of her work, mostly inspired by literary themes, in the rectory of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. The editor of the Cincinnati Chronicle, passing through Marietta, saw the show and waxed rhapsodic. He described the work of this country girl as the “most astonishing instance of precocity and triumph over difficulty in the arts.”
Nicholas Longworth (1783–1863), Mansfield’s designated philanthropist, was a nationally-known Cincinnati lawyer, landowner, vintner, art collector and patron of promising Ohio artists. Relying on Mansfield’s judgment, Longworth, sight unseen, immediately offered Lilly Martin money to travel to New England to study in Boston with the revered American artist, Washington Allston, and visit with John Trumbull in Connecticut. Longworth further advised Martin against a solo show in Cincinnati, arguing that she was not yet ready to expose herself to the level of criticism such a venture would invite. At this point, Lilly Martin displayed the self-confidence and constancy of purpose that sustained her unlikely career throughout her life. She politely declined Longworth’s offer to subsidize a trip east and she moved to Cincinnati, where she did indeed show her paintings in November 1841. Her father accompanied her for a while, saw her settled, and then returned to Marietta, leaving his 20-year-old daughter to establish her career in art in Cincinnati. The Martins met Longworth on their first day in Cincinnati and despite the initial rebuff, his enthusiasm was undimmed. He subsequently offered to send Lilly to Europe to study, an offer she similarly declined.
Lilly Martin remained in Cincinnati for seven years, a span that constitutes the first phase of her professional career. Cincinnati had a lively art community, and she took advantage of all that the growing city offered, exhibiting wherever she could, seeking portrait commissions and studying with local artists, John Insco Williams, James Beard, and W. A. Adams. In 1844 she married Benjamin Rush Spencer (1813?–1890), an English immigrant who had worked in the textile business and as a tailor. Theirs proved to be a long and happy union. Benjamin Spencer pursued various occupations, but his activities never provided the primary source of income. He acted as Lilly’s studio assistant and shared household responsibilities with his wife for a growing family that came to include seven children who survived into adulthood. It was an arrangement that remains uncommon today. In the nineteenth century it can only have been quite extraordinary. In 1846 Spencer contacted the American Art-Union in New York inquiring about sending pictures. In 1847 she sold canvasses to the Cincinnati-based Western Art Union and also took a studio in the new Art Union Building. While portraits and still lifes remained a basic stock in trade as they did for many artists, it was, increasingly, her genre paintings that found favor with a newly created art-buying public. Spencer often found her subject matter at home. A rising middle class identified with the idealized depiction of contemporary American domesticity that Spencer presented in her genre works. In 1848 Martin sold two pictures to the American Art-Union in New York for their annual lottery and had a work accepted for the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design.
Late in 1848, the Spencers relocated to New York City, believing that New York offered the best array of exhibition and sales opportunities, in short, visibility, for an American artist. In the ten years that Spencer remained in New York City, she enjoyed her greatest success. She exhibited repeatedly at the Art-Union and the National Academy of Design. In 1849 the Western Art Union distributed an engraving of Life’s Happy Hour (original canvas unlocated) as its premium to subscribers. This was the first of series of Spencer’s genre pictures translated to print media and widely distributed, a process which unfortunately entailed more fame than fortune, since once the artist sold her picture, she had no control over the quality of the reproduction and no share in the profits of large sales. Sometimes, even, the engraver’s name appeared on the image, and not that of the artist. In New York, Spencer took evening classes in drawing at the National Academy to address deficiencies in drawing resulting from her ad-hoc training. In 1850 she was elected an Honorary Member, Professional, of the Academy, the highest honor open to a woman at a time when female artists, if they showed talent, were generally condescended to as amateurs by their fellow professionals.
In 1858, the Spencers moved again, this time to Newark, New Jersey, near to New York but considerably less expensive. Spencer continued to benefit from her connection to Nicholas Longworth. The family rented a suitable house with a small backyard studio owned by Marcus L. Ward, a descendant of one of the original founders of Newark, and nephew by marriage of Longworth, a Newark native.
In the 1850s and ‘60s, Spencer was “America’s most famous woman artist." She sold paintings to William Shaus, an art dealer and entrepreneur who commissioned reproductions in Europe and sold them in Europe and America. As late as 1868, Louis Prang distributed a chromolithograph of Spencer’s Blackberries in a Vase. Through the 1860s and ‘70s Spencer continued to exhibit at the National Academy, the Brooklyn Art Association, and the Boston Athenaeum, but her popularity had peaked, and income never ran very far ahead of the expenses attendant on a large family. In 1876 Spencer was included in the fine arts exhibition at the Women’s Pavilion of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, grateful enough for the exposure, but reputedly disappointed that her paintings were shown with the women and not in the general Fine Arts section.
Over the years Spencer attempted to adjust her style to changing market conditions. Although she never gave up genre painting, she darkened her palette and softened her drawing style to accommodate contemporary taste. Nothing she could do, however, could compensate for the sea-change shift in the American art market after the Civil War as newly rich barons of commerce and industry scrambled to acquire European art, old and new, in preference to anything American. In 1879 the Spencer family decamped from Newark for rural Highland, New York, across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie. Rustication further weakened Spencer’s already tenuous presence in the New York art scene. She never stopped trying but could not turn back the veil of obscurity that descended as the century ended.
