Lilly Martin Spencer Still Life with Apples 1891

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 scenes 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. She was a skilled portraitist, but it is perhaps her still-life work which is most intriguing. It played an important role as a pictorial element in her most famous genre scenes, but until recently, few examples of her dedicated still life subjects have come to light.