Robert Spencer

Robert Carpenter Spencer (1 December 1879 – 11 July 1931) was an American painter who received extensive recognition in his day. He was one of the Pennsylvania impressionists, but is better known for his paintings of the mills and working people of the Delaware River region than for landscapes. His work is held in numerous public collections. Early years Robert Carpenter Spencer was born on 1 December 1879 in Harvard, Nebraska, son of Solomon Hogue Spencer, a Swedenborgian clergyman and a distant descendant of the English noble Spencer family. His mother was Frances Strickler Spencer, daughter of a buggy manufacturer. His father left the church to teach for a few years while his two children were infants. He returned to the ministry in 1884. He co-founded, published and edited The New Christianity, a Swedenborgian journal. The family moved often. They lived in Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia and then Yonkers, New York, where Robert Spencer graduated from high school in 1899. Spencer had planned to study medicine, but instead in 1899 began to study art at the National Academy of Design in New York City. He met and befriended the painter Charles Rosen while at the academy. From 1903 to 1905 he studied under William Merritt Chase at his New York School of Art, and probably studied under Robert Henri. He spent about a year working for a civil engineering company as a draftsman and surveyor. His father died in 1906.