As the son of a Swedenborgian clergyman without a permanent parish, Robert Spencer was 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 schools of the Academy; it was at the Academy school he formed what was to be a lifelong friendship with fellow student Charles Rosen. 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. It is likely in this period that Spencer met Edward Redfield, and also William Lathrop, who, although his senior by twenty years, became a good friend. For the summer of 1909, Spencer lived at Daniel Garber's Lumberville, Pennsylvania, home and studio, and studied with the rising young Impressionist, a short but influential experience. In 1910, Spencer settled in New Hope, in Pennsylvania's Bucks County, sharing a house with the painter, Charles Frederic Ramsey. Lathrop introduced him to Margaret Alexina Harrison Fulton, architect, painter, and niece of Alexander and Birge Harrison, whom he married in 1914.
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, with Rosen, Lathrop, Garber, Rae Sloan Bredin and Morgan Colt, formed the "New Hope Group" in 1916, for the purpose presenting exhibitions of their work. By the second decade of the twentieth century, Spencer was well known for his scenes of working class life, a combination of Impressionist palette, and short, tight, agressive brushstroke, with Ash Can School subjects. His factories and tenement houses served as a backdrop for his figures, for it was "the human side . . . the intimate contact with man" that was essential to him. In the 1920s, however, Spencer turned to the Delaware river for subject matter, and, after two trips to Europe in the later twenties, he concentrated on imaginary European scenes.
Spencer's awards received in Academy exhibitions reflect the course of his career. He received a Hallgarten prize in 1913, an Inness Gold Medal the next year, Altman prize in 1921, and Isidor medal in 1928.
Spencer had suffered several nervous breakdowns during his life, and he took his own life with a pistol shot.
