The bullet in the easel

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 2004 by Alfred Mayor

In 1970, nearly forty years after her father shot himself, Margaret Spencer found the fatal bullet embedded in the immense easel he built in his studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Robert Spencer was fifty-one when he committed suicide, after a career as one of the most exhibited and successful of the group of artists known as the Pennsylvania impressionists. However, while most of the others painted cheerful snow scenes and villages, Spencer worked in a muted palette and chose as his subjects the tenements and mills along the canals of the Delaware river and the people who lived and worked in them. A Boston newspaper critic summed up these scenes with great vividness: "Out of the grime and smoke and deadly commonplace of the mills, the ugliness of the tenement houses, the sickening squalor of a row of unpainted shacks lining the farther side of a canal, [Spencer] manages to extract the 'fleur du mal,' the blossom of beauty emerging from the slime of the gutter."

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The artist was born in Nebraska, the son of an itinerant Sweden-borgian minister, and, as a keen genealogist found that his family tree included an earl of Spencer. However, his favorite ancestor was a pirate who roved the Caribbean Sea in the service of Queen Elizabeth I. Spencer married Margaret Fulton, a painter and architect and a descendant of the artist and engineer Robert Fulton. She grew up comfortably in Philadelphia, where her mother was painted by Thomas Eakins. The Spencers were alternately madly in love with each other or "positively thrived on battles--high-pitched, screaming tirades," according to one of the reminiscences left by their daughter Margaret, known as Tink. Spencer took his revenge for these scenes by using himself and his wife as models for paintings ironically entitled Happy Family and Alann Clock. The first, quite reminiscent of the work of Honore Daumier, one of Spencer's favorite artists, shows Spencer dressed and kneeling, fending off an enraged Margaret, who has leaped out of bed and nearly out of her night-dress and is grappling with her husband. On the floor sits a yowling baby. Alann Clock shows a disheveled grumpy Spencer sitting up in bed, while Margaret prepares to wrench the covers off.

Sometimes to recover from these fights, Spencer would flee to New York City for weeks at a time to paint the waterfront in Harlem, or his wife would retreat to a building on their property that contained a studio, kitchen, and bedrooms. She held the only key.

In another mood, Spencer was a convivial companion who was welcomed by the most hospitable of the impressionists, William Langson Lathrop, and his wife at their mill in New Hope, Pennsylvania, which was the social center for the group. The Spencers, in turn, liked to organize parties at which they served the beer Robert brewed in his cellar, where he also made sake and grew edible mushrooms. Oddly, Robert Spencer became an excellent golfer, playing on the local course and with the pros at East Hampton, Long Island, when he visited relations there.

Spencer could not read music and had no ear for harmony, but this did not prevent him from playing the piano. As Tink Spencer recalled, "he often sat for hours at the piano pressing out great crescendoing chords and passionate single-noted melodies. And at other times--with soft, retaining, and loud pedals all to the floor--he made queer, haunting music blow through the house making time forgotten. He said it made him paint better and that he could get, from the music in his head, the substance and the shape and the color of what he wanted to put on canvas." These shapeless sessions at the piano doubtless helped him build the increasingly imagined scenes he painted in his later career. As he wrote to his friend and faithful patron Duncan Phillips in 1926, "I have to ... build a city of real bricks and mortar before I paint it, and the real bricks and mortar are imagination--solidified.... I first have to make what I see--so it's slow--dreadfully slow."

Phillips was the founder of the Phillips Collection in his Washington, D. C., house and a perceptive writer about art. His letter of condolence to the Spencer family after Spencer's suicide is a perfect summary: "His art revealed a subtle apprehension of harmonies in a minor key and of unities of mood pervaded by an unconscious wistfulness."

Many of Spencer's and Phillips's papers were lost in a fire in 1971. However, a revealing sampling of their correspondence is printed at the end of this excellent book, which accompanies a recent exhibition of Spencer's work at the James A. Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania. In addition to biographical information there is much illuminating editorial comment about the paintings and Spencer's changing style. At the end there is a selection of excerpts from reviews and articles about his work, a reconstructed exhibition record, and a selected list of the honors and awards he received. There is, however, no index.

The Cities, the Towns, the Crowds: The Paintings of Robert Spencer, by Brian H. Peterson (James A. Michener Art Museum and University of Pennsylvania Press, 800-537-5487), $39.95 (hardcovers).