Robert Spencer was an American artist who represented the Pennsylvania School of Impressionism. He became famous for his beautiful landscapes as well as for the paintings depicting the mills and the workers of the Delaware River region. The artist was also known as one of the founders of the New Hope Group.
Background
Ethnicity:
Robert Spencer’s father was a remote ancestor of the English aristocratic Spencer family.
Robert Spencer was born on December 1, 1879, in Harvard, Nebraska, United States. He was a son of Solomon Hogue Spencer, a preacher, and Frances Strickler, a daughter of a vehicle manufacturer.
Solomon participated at the creation of the Swedenborgian journal titled ‘The New Christianity’. He traveled a lot around the churches of the country to teach, so young Robert spent the significant part of his childhood and youth on the trips. However, the family finally settled down in Yonkers, New York.
Education
Robert Spencer received his general education at a high school in Yonkers, New York which he finished in 1899. Firstly, he chose medicine to pursue his high education but soon shifted to art and after graduating high school, he entered the National Academy of Design in New York City. During two years he spent at the institution, Spencer got acquainted with the painter Charles Rosen.
In 1903, Robert Spencer became a student of the New York School of Art (currently the Parsons School of Design) where he had been taught by William Merritt Chase and perhaps by Robert Henri.
Three years later, Spencer relocated to New Hope, Pennsylvania where he took private lessons from the representative of the local school of painting Daniel Garber.
Later, Robert Spencer received some lessons from a landscapist William Lathrop.
The start of Robert Spencer’s career can be counted from the work at the civil engineering company where he occupied the post of a draftsman and surveyor in about 1906.
Three years later, the young artist settled down in New Hope, Pennsylvania where he shared a studio with a painter Charles Frederic Ramsey. Both artists lived in extreme poverty. However, the period was prolific for Spencer who produced a lot of canvases and successfully exhibited them at the National Academy of Art and Design and the Art Club of Philadelphia.
Spencer took an active part at the artistic life of the community and met a lot of the local impressionists, among whom where Rae Sloan Bredin, Charles Rosen, Morgan Colt, Daniel Garber and William Langson Lathrop. In 1916, they established the New Hope Group in order to promote their artworks through common exhibitions.
It was also this time when Spencer created his first landscapes of the Delaware River region. In contrast to the majority of the local impressionists who concentrated primarily on the natural views, the painter showed on his canvases the worker class people and, various industrial buildings and factories. This brightly new manner caught the attention of art critics and provided Spencer with acclaim and financial stability during the 1920s.
He was regularly invited to participate at the exhibitions within the country, including the shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Albright–Knox Art Gallery and the Art Institute of Chicago, and abroad, in Canada, the United Kingdom and France.
At the end of his life, the artist traveled around Europe where he began to work on the imaginary scenes.
Quotations:
"A landscape without a building or a figure is a very lonely picture to me."
Membership
National Academy of Design
,
United States
1914
Allied Artists of America
,
United States
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
"[Spencer was] a rebel always against the standardized and stereotyped in art... [there was] no other painter, not John Sloan, or Edward Hopper, more pungently American in expression." Duncan Phillips, art collector
Connections
Robert Spencer met his future wife, Margaret Alexina Harrison Fulton, in 1913 during his regular visits to the painter William Lathrop. Margaret was a student of the latter. She came from a prosperous family. The painters Thomas Alexander Harrison and Lovell Birge Harrison were her uncles. Robert and Margaret married a year after their meeting.
The family produced two daughters named Margaret Fulton and Ann Harrison.