Lilly Martin Spencer

American, 1822 - 1902

Death-PlaceNew York, NY

Birth-PlaceExeter, England

BiographyLilly Martin Spencer

(b. England, 1822-1902)

Giles and Angélique Martin emigrated to the United States from France in 1830 with their eight-year-old daughter Angélique Marie, called Lilly, and their two sons. After a brief stay in New York, the family pushed on to Marietta, Ohio, where they pursued various progressive causes, including abolition, women's suffrage, and communal living according to the ideas of the French social scientist and reformer Charles Fourier. In Ohio, Lilly Martin's precocious talent for drawing emerged, and her liberal parents encouraged her to pursue her vocation, regardless of her gender.

After her first successful public art exhibition, Lilly and her father moved to Cincinnati in 1841 in search of patronage and further art training. They soon met Nicholas Longworth, the noted art collector and patron, who made his collection available to Lilly and introduced her to artists such as portraitist James Beard and portrait and panorama painter John Insco Williams, from whom she received more formal instruction in painting. She stayed in Cincinnati for seven years, marrying Benjamin Rush Spencer in 1844.

The Spencer family moved to New York City in 1848 specifically to further Lilly's career. It was their unusual decision that Lilly would earn the family living by painting and Benjamin would support her by taking over certain household duties and studio chores such as stretching canvases and placing works for exhibition and sale. The years in New York provided both success and great disappointment. Spencer's genre paintings were popular at the National Academy of Design and at the various art unions, which often reproduced them as prints; but she was discouraged to see her allegorical and literary paintings ignored and her domestic scenes celebrated, as if her sex required her adherence to a particular subject matter.

The strain of supporting seven children (she bore a total of thirteen, seven of whom lived beyond infancy) and the vagaries of the art market drove the family to resettle in Newark, New Jersey, in 1858. A wealthy patron, banker and politician Marcus L. Ward helped support her with portrait commissions. To make ends meet, Spencer colored photographs and sold her paintings as models for lithographs, for which she rarely received royalties. Spencer did, however, support her family with her art and never gave up being a painter.

This Little Pig Went to Market, 1857
Oil on artist's board, with hand-cut arched top, 16 x 11 7/8 in. (40.6 x 30.2 cm)
Signed (indistinctly, lower left): Lilly M. Spencer
Charles F. Smith Fund (1994.18)

Spencer's art has been celebrated and maligned since her early days as a painter, in the 1840s. As fashions in art changed, her genre paintings were attacked as, variously, heavily sentimental, stiffly Victorian, and weak in their feminist stance. Yet Spencer was one of the most popular genre painters in antebellum America. Although her paintings did not fare well in the post-Civil War art market, she continued to make a living as an artist until her death in 1902. Today, she is seen as both a conservative and a radical. She stuck with safe themes of domesticity for the most part but dealt with them in unique ways, distinguishing her from the male genre painters of her day. Her work is "self-opposing," (1)possessing contradictions born of the need to survive and make a living while preserving one's own voice.

This Little Pig Went to Market illustrates Spencer's ability to be both pleasing and provoking. A happy baby sits enthroned on the lap of his lovely mother, who plays out the nursery rhyme on his little toes. The nursery has opulent furnishings, with a gold-topped curtained cradle, a gold-figured tablecloth, and a large patterned rug on the floor. The entire image is enshrined in a curved frame as if it were a Raphael Madonna.

While many nineteenth-century genre images extol the (boy) child over the attending parent, Spencer's attention falls as much on the mother as on the child. Her rich green dressing gown has deep borders of an Oriental design and a lining of rose-colored silk. Beneath it a sparkling white lace nightgown spreads across her elegantly beribboned velvet slipper. She is absorbed in her child; we are absorbed in her. The seeming wealth of the painting led a reviewer to interpret the subject as Empress Eugénie of France and the Prince Imperial, a subject completely incompatible with Spencer's solidly middle-class domestic imagery. (2) More likely, Spencer and her son Charles are the models, and the details are elaborations on their own more modest circumstances. (3)

It is typical of Spencer to focus on the mother. Many of her genre paintings feature women in their familiar spaces. Rather than displaying them decoratively with the furniture in the parlor, Spencer shows active women in the kitchen (“Shake Hands?” 1854; Ohio Historical Center, Columbus), preparing food (“Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the Lasses,” 1856; Brooklyn Museum of Art), reading newspapers in the midst of the hubbub of daily life (“War Spirit at Home,” 1866; Newark Museum, N.J.), or performing child-care chores (“Beauty and Barbarism” and “Beauty Barbarized” both ca. 1890; private collection). Real women take care of real life in paintings by this woman artist. Even the spruced up mother in This Little Pig Went to Market sits with her child in the personal space of a nursery and not in a more formal public parlor.

Spencer's work, then, is closer in flavor to seventeenth-century Dutch genre paintings than to Italian Madonnas. For instance, Gerrit Dou's The Young Mother (ca.1660; Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin-Dahlem) shows a well dressed mother with a baby on her lap and a young child at her elbow. Behind them is a canopy bed with a curtain pulled back, reminiscent of the curtained cradle in Spencer's painting. And, like Spencer’s, the entire image rests harmoniously under a curved arch. Although it is unlikely that Spencer ever saw Dou's painting, Dutch works were well known in the United States by the mid-nineteenth century and she surely saw a number of examples in Nicholas Longworth's collection in Cincinnati. (4) In Spencer's work and in Dutch genre painting, acts of daily life have a simple sacramental yet warmly humorous tone that well suited a largely middle-class audience.

The New Britain version of This Little Pig Went to Market is one of two known copies of the now-lost original. The dimensions of the original painting are known to have been twenty-four by twenty inches, which does not match the dimensions of the New Britain painting or the better-known version at the Campus Martius Museum in Spencer's hometown, Marietta, Ohio. (5) The two versions are virtually identical and attest to the popularity of the original painting: it appears that Spencer received commissions to make both copies (a frequent, and lucrative, nineteenth-century practice). In addition, the image was reproduced as an engraving in 1859 for the Cosmopolitan Art Association. Most modern reproductions replicate the Campus Martius version.

LW
Bibliography:

Lilly Martin Spencer Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; M. B. Cowdrey, "Lilly Martin Spencer, 1822-1902: Painter of the American Sentimental Scene," American Collector 13 (August 1944): 6-7, 14, 19; E. S. Reiter, "Lily Martin Spencer," Museum Echoes 27 (May 1954): 35-38; Robin Bolton-Smith and William H. Truettner, Lilly Martin Spencer (1822-1902): The Joys of Sentiment (Washington, D.C.: National Collection of Fine Arts, 1973); Elizabeth Johns, American Genre Painting: The Poli
tics of Everyday Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991); David M. Lubin, Picturing a Nation: Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).

Notes:
1. Lubin, “Picturing a Nation,” pp. 162-63.
2 . Reiter, "Lilly Martin Spencer," p. 37.
3 . Bolton-Smith and Truettner, “Lilly Martin Spencer,” p. 169.
4 . Ibid., pp. 16-17.
5 . In 1973 Bolton-Smith and Truettner (ibid, pp. 169-70) note the existence of the Campus Martius copy but not of the New Britain version, evidently unknown at the time.

Person Type(not assigned)

Terms