Lilly Martin Spencer

Lilly Martin Spencer was born in Exeter, England, on November 26, 1822, to French intellectual parents who supported abolitionism and women's education. In 1830 the family settled in Marietta, Ohio, where her mother homeschooled the children and they worked the family farm. Spencer showed early artistic talent, and in 1841 her father took her to Cincinnati to study with portrait painter John Insco Williams.

Her work attracted local notice and the patronage of collector Nicholas Longworth, who offered to fund European study, but Spencer chose to remain in the United States, training further with James Henry Beard and William Althorpe Adams. By 1842 she was accepting portrait commissions and exhibiting in local venues. In 1844 she married Benjamin Rush Spencer, an English immigrant tailor who, unable to find steady work, became her business manager and shared childcare duties.

The couple had thirteen children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. In 1848 the family moved to New York City, where Spencer enrolled in evening drawing classes at the National Academy of Design and in 1850 was elected an honorary member, the highest distinction then available to women. She sold work through the Cosmopolitan Art Association and exhibited in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. Her genre paintings, detailed, naturalistic domestic scenes such as "This Little Pig Went to Market," "Kiss Me and You'll Kiss the 'Lasses," and "Young Husband: First Marketing", were engraved and distributed to tens of thousands of subscribers, spreading her fame nationally.

She also addressed the Civil War and Reconstruction in works like "The War Spirit at Home" and "The Home of the Red, White, and Blue." After living in Newark, New Jersey, for two decades, the family settled in Highland, New York, on the Hudson River, where Spencer continued to paint until her death on May 22, 1902. She exhibited at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, and her work is now held in institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.