TitleAcross the River
Artist
Robert C. Spencer
(American, 1879 - 1931)
Datec. 1916
MediumOil on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 25 × 30 in.
Framed: 28 1/4 × 33 9/16 × 2 3/4 in.
SignedSigned lower right: "Robert Spencer."
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, October 4, 1920
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1196-P
Label TextAs the son of a Swedenborgian clergyman without a permanent parish, Robert Spencer led a restless life through his youth, living in Illinois, Missouri, Virginia, and Yonkers, New York. In 1899 he was admitted to the New York College of Physicians and Surgeons, but he decided instead to study art. That year he began three years of study in the school of the National Academy. From 1903 to 1905, Spencer worked with William Merritt Chase, and probably Robert Henri, at the New York School of Art. He also spent about one year as a draftsman and surveyor in a civil engineering firm sometime before 1906, the first of four years spent living in Frenchtown, New Jersey and in Point Pleasant, Pennsylvania.For the summer of 1909, Spencer lived at Daniel Garber's Lumberville, Pennsylvania home and studio, and the following year settled in New Hope, in Pennsylvania's Bucks County, the seat of Pennsylvania impressionism. It was in this period that Spencer painted the series of pictures of Pennsylvania mills, and the women who worked in them, by which he is best remembered today. Spencer, along with Charles Rosen, William Lathrop, Garber, Rae Sloan Bredin, and Morgan Colt, formed the "New Hope Group" in 1916, for the purpose presenting exhibitions of their work. In the 1920s, Spencer turned to the Delaware River for subject matter, as seen in "Across the River," painted about the time he was elected an Academician. The mill and tenement buildings that had been featured in his earlier paintings were literally being distanced by his increased attention to landscape. Spencer had suffered several nervous breakdowns during his life, and in 1931 he took his own life with a pistol shot.
