Robert
Carpenter Spencer ( 1879 – 1931) was an American painter who received
extensive recognition in his day. He was one of the Pennsylvania
impressionists, but is better known for his paintings of the mills and
working people of the Delaware River region than for landscapes. His
work is held in numerous public collections.
Spencer is
known for his paintings of figures against a backdrop of factories and
apartment houses, in an impressionist style with short, tight
brushstrokes. The paintings he made in 1909–1910 of the Pennsylvania
mills and the women mill workers are considered his best. He said, "A
landscape without a building or a figure is a very lonely picture to
me." Well known works include The Silk Mill (1912), Grey Mills (1913),
The Closing Hour (1913) and Repairing the Bridge (1913). The
Metropolitan Museum of Art bought Repairing the Bridge in 1914. His
painting On the Canal, New Hope was acquired in 1916 by the Detroit
Museum of Art. It depicts the back of run-down houses on the canal, with
the lower portions whitewashed and bathed in light, with women doing
housework.
A
contemporary critic wrote, "Interpreted thro' the temperament of Robert
Spencer a squalid motive which most of us would pass daily and regard as
hopelessly commonplace is presented in a way to stir our emotions and
without losing anything of its truth..." Pierre Bonnard said in 1926
"Mr. Spencer . . . is in the full vigor of his talent, which is great.
His art does not resemble European art, a rare fact in America."
According to the art collector Duncan Phillips he 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."
Spencer
exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. Institutions that hold
his work include the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art, the James A. Michener Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the
Smithsonian Institution, the Berkshire Museum, the Corcoran Gallery of
Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Academy of Design, The
Reading Public Museum, the Detroit Institute of Fine Arts, the National
Arts Club, the Delaware Art Museum, the Widener University Art Museum
and The Phillips Collection in Washington D.C
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