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When Robert Spencer moved to New Hope, Pennsylvania in 1909, he quickly became a prominent figure in the art community there. The beauty and serenity of the small town, which is situated on the Pennsylvania Canal north of Philadelphia, and the fame of its notable inhabitants—namely the lauded impressionist painter Edward Redfield and the "dean" of the art colony, William Lathrop—attracted many artists to the area. While members of the contemporary Boston School, led by Edmund Tarbell, favored genre and society portraits, the Pennsylvania impressionists painted the countryside surrounding the Delaware River along the Pennsylvania-New Jersey border.
The relationship of architecture and people to nature remained Spencer's preoccupation throughout his career. Spencer followed in the realist tradition of Henri, Manet, and, ultimately, Velásquez, but unlike his realist predecessors, Spencer did not record his impressions with great speed. He wrote to Duncan Phillips in 1926: "I can't paint them 'while you wait'....I have to...build a city of real bricks and mortar before I paint it—and the real bricks and mortar are imagination—solidified.”
Phillips particularly admired Spencer's "ability to express in pictures a significant relation of figures to landscape," and he selected him to be a member of the Gallery's Committee on Scope and Plan because of their shared philosophies on art and collecting. At the time of the incorporation of The Phillips Memorial Gallery in 1921, the collection included eight paintings by Spencer: two from his early mill series, a backyard scene, a Delaware River view, and four village scenes.
In the final years of his life, Spencer painted religious subjects and small genre scenes. Following Spencer's death, Phillips tried to explain, and even defend, his friend's position in the history of art: "Conservative? Certainly. He could not see in the new theoretical ways, and naturally he resented a School which obscured his own predilections and purposes. Academic? Quite the reverse. He was a rebel always against the standardized and the stereotyped in art." Phillips believed "there [was] no other painter, not John Sloan or Edward Hopper, more pungently American in expression.
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