SPENCER, LILLY MARTIN

born Nov. 26, 1822, Exeter, Eng. died May 22, 1902, New York, N.Y., U.S. ne Angelique Marie Martin French-born American painter who for a time enjoyed an enormous popularity for her genre paintings, illustrations, and portraits. Angelique Martin was the daughter of French parents who immigrated to the United States in 1830. She grew up in Marietta, Ohio, and received a thorough education at home. Having exhibited artistic talent from an early age, she began studying drawing and oil painting with local artists. A showing of her paintingsportraits, genre pieces, and literary scenesheld in Marietta in 1841 was a success, and in the fall of that year she settled in Cincinnati, Ohio, where in a few years she firmly established herself as a leading local artist. She married Benjamin R. Spencer in 1844, and in 1848 she moved to New York City, where her work had already been exhibited successfully at the National Academy of Design and the American Art-Union. The latter institutionone of a number of similar ones that flourished for a time by holding exhibitions, distributing reproductions of artworks to members, and holding annual lotteries for originalslaunched Lilly Spencer as a nationally known artist. Through the American Art-Union and the Western Art Union, which in 1849 commissioned her One of Life's Happy Hours, reproductions of her genre and anecdotal paintings reached thousands of homes. At an exhibit staged by the American Art-Union in 1852, her works brought higher prices than those of John J. Audubon, George Caleb Bingham, Eastman Johnson, and William S. Mount. She also received commissions for illustrations from Godey's Lady's Book and other magazines, illustrated such books as Elizabeth F. Ellet's Women of the American Revolution (1850), and executed portraits on private commission. Among her portrait subjects were First Lady Caroline Harrison and suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. In 1858 Spencer and her large family moved to Newark, New Jersey, but a few years later she took a studio in New York City, where for some years she worked on her monumental Truth Unveiling Falsehood, which was acclaimed a masterwork on its completion in 1869. She refused as much as $20,000 for the painting, which was later lost. Her popularity declined in later years, although she continued to work.