Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Lilly Martin Spencer was a professional artist for over 60 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.
(Biography provided by Hirschl & Adler)
19th Century Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Oil
19th Century Academic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Oil
19th Century American Realist Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
1860s Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Oil
1850s Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Oil
1850s Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
Late 20th Century Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
Early 20th Century Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
Mid-20th Century Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Masonite, Oil
1830s Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Oil, Wood Panel
2010s Academic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
1970s Academic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
1820s Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
Mid-19th Century Academic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil
1990s Romantic Lilly Martin Spencer Art
Canvas, Oil