Lewis P. Clover's father was a publisher of prints and the proprietor of a frame and artists' supply shop, which he opened in lower Manhattan three years before his son was born. Quite naturally, the shop was frequented by the city's artists and probably just as naturally served as an incentive to the younger Clover's initial choice of profession. Clover was apprenticed to Durand for three years, presumably in the mid-1830s; he must have been a precocious student, for he exhibited a portrait and a "study from nature" at the American Academy in 1835, when he was just sixteen. In the same year Durand exhibited The Capture of Major André (1834, Worcester [Mass.] Art Museum), for which Clover had been the model for the figure of the British spy. He also took the Academy school's antique class during the 1835-36 season, at the close of which he received the prize in the competition for a small drawing from the cast of the anatomical figure. Clover enrolled in the Academy school again in 1838-39 for both the antique and life classes; in 1840-41 for the antique; and in 1841-42 for the life.
Clover's career does not appear to have truly begun until 1838, when he first was represented in an Academy annual exhibition and made his sole appearance in a Boston Athenaeum exhibition. His work was included in the Apollo Association exhibitions of 1839, 1840, and 1841; and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, exhibition of 1840. He continued showing at the National Academy through 1845, when he noted that his address was in Baltimore, Maryland. His paintings were landscapes and portraits and apparently moral-pointing genre subjects, such as the Cabinet Picture that Thomas Seir Cummings lent to the Academy annual of 1841, the catalogue listing for which was accompanied by a quotation from Psalm 25: "I have been young but now am old, yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread." This is probably the painting Cummings lent to the Philadelphia Art Association exhibition later the same year under the title Reading the Bible.
Clover turned away from his artistic career in favor of one in the Episcopal Church. He was probably engaged in his divinity studies in the later 1840s, for he was ordained in 1850. He served as rector in churches in Lexington, Virginia, in Springfield, Illinois, and other locations. He did not give up painting altogether, however. The Christ Blessing Children by the "Rev. S. P. Clover" after an engraving, exhibited in Chicago in 1859, was probably his work. He is known to have executed a portrait of Abraham Lincoln in 1860. And in the Academy annual of 1886-at a time when Associates who did not contribute to annuals were being dropped from membership-Clover made a final appearance with Sundown and No Fish.
The remembrances of members who had died the previous year given in the annual report delivered at the Academicians' meeting on May 12, 1897, noted that Clover had studied painting under William Page before studying engraving under Durand and that he edited the American edition of John Burnet's Hints on Composition in Painting as well as engraved its illustrations.
Academy records state that the date 1836 is inscribed on the back of the original canvas (now obscured by the mounting board) on which Durand painted Clover's portrait. Clover would have been seventeen at the time, an age appropriate to the image of the young man. L. P. Clover, presumably the artist's father, lent a Portrait of a Gentlemen by Durand to the Academy annual of 1837 that may have been this work. Several years later, when Clover needed a portrait to present to the Academy in fulfillment of his election requirement, his parents may have yielded the 1836 painting-or Durand may have executed a replica for his former student.
