Lilly Martin Spencer: Hearth, Home, and National Fame

A few years ago, a wonderful painting by Spencer joined the Art Institute’s collection, This Little Pig Went to Market. It is a seemingly quiet work that offers up a wealth of stories the more time you spend with it.

Painted about 1857, the composition features a mother and child playing a game in a bedroom or other domestic space. At center a young boy sits on his mother’s lap, gazing out toward the viewer with an apprehensive smile. The woman encircles the child with her right hand while she squeezes his big toe with her left—enacting the first verse of the eponymous nursery rhyme. She wears an elegant green dressing gown over a white lace nightgown. The setting is likewise ornate: a canopied bassinet, trimmed in blue and gold, anchors the space behind the pair; the woman sits on a gothic-inspired wooden chair and rests her slippered feet on a plush footstool; and upon the table at right are delicately rendered articles, including a cup and saucer and the child’s leather shoes.

Spencer exceled at vibrant everyday scenes like this one—called genre painting—employing a vocabulary of detailed, polished realism to portray familial narratives, combined with intricate passages of still life. Her subject matter was oftentimes at arm’s length. The artist drew from her own lived experience in the United States at midcentury, that is to say, from white, urban, middle-class households such as hers. Spencer, for instance, probably used herself and her son William Henry (born in 1855) as models for the two figures in This Little Pig Went to Market. The composition’s interior may be the product of a more imaginative pursuit—featuring furnishings that were possibly out of reach for the artist and her family. The painting likely held strong visual appeal for a range of middle-class audiences, some of whom could relate to the comforts depicted, while others aspired to a life with greater means. The acquisitive taste for art among the middle classes was expanding at a record clip, and Spencer was keen to be in the game.

A professional artist, working mother, and the breadwinner for her family, Lilly Martin Spencer was a remarkable force in the art world at midcentury.

She was the only nationally recognized female genre painter of her time, establishing a career in Cincinnati in the 1840s and cultivating success in New York, and later Newark, through the 1860s. Born in England to French parents in 1822, Angélique Marie Martin (later Spencer), known as “Lilly,” grew up in Marietta, Ohio, among an educated, reform-minded family. Her father was a French professor, her mother schooled Spencer and her siblings at home, and they all worked the family farm. Spencer expressed an early interest in the fine arts, which her parents encouraged and supported. At nineteen years of age, she relocated to Cincinnati in pursuit of formal instruction as well as commissions, her father moving with her. Within a few years, she had begun exhibiting her work at important venues such as the Western Art Union and the National Academy of Design. In 1848, then married with two children (the artist would endure thirteen pregnancies and raise seven surviving children), Spencer and her family left the Midwest for New York City in search of greater opportunity. Benjamin Spencer, who did not secure steady work with his skills as a tailor, duly supported his wife’s career—assisting her with painting assignments, managing business affairs, and sharing in childcare duties.

From her New York home, Spencer executed This Little Pig Went to Market, focusing on the pair’s emotional bond. All the while, the nursery rhyme’s story is outward looking, presenting a narrative that hints at the child’s future need for self-reliance: “This little pig went to market / This little pig stayed at home / This little pig got roast beef / This little pig got none / This little pig cried wee, wee, all the way home.” The mother pinches a toe at each verse and then—reassuring a sense of security and nurturing in the moment—squeezes the child’s foot and gives a hug at the game’s conclusion. Here, the boy seems to anticipate the ending—a smile spreading on his face while tears form in his eyes.

Similarly, the painting itself was outward-bound. Shortly after its creation, This Little Pig Went to Market circulated beyond the Spencer home in several ways. It was purchased by the Cosmopolitan Art Association, one of a number of commercial art organizations that emerged in the 1840s and 1850s with the entwined aims of bringing new audiences to the fine arts and turning a profit. Such groups hosted exhibitions, patronized artists, published art journals, commissioned and distributed print reproductions, and raffled off original artworks. The Cosmopolitan Art Association exhibited the painting at their New York gallery, produced an engraving for its some 27,000 subscribers, and then awarded the painting by lottery to a lucky recipient.

The expansive itineraries of works like This Little Pig Went to Market garnered Spencer national fame. From original oils to reproductions as engravings, lithographs, and chromolithographs, her compositions were familiar and beloved by many. She occasionally undertook portrait commissions and other subjects, but genre paintings were her bread and butter. Such works hooked audiences with their ready storylines and abundant details, guiding viewers while also remaining flexible enough to support more than one reading or conclusion. Spencer gave women leading roles in her scenes, celebrating a maternal figure in the Art Institute’s painting, for instance, or highlighting the arduous tasks of a domestic worker, as in The Jolly Washerwoman.

In this respect, Spencer stood apart from her male peers, including George Caleb Bingham, Francis William Edmonds, and William Sidney Mount, who oftentimes relegated women to supporting roles or sidelined them altogether.

Works by spencer’s Male Peers

Spencer deftly employed humor in her compositions, enabling audiences to align their sympathies with a figure—or be in on the joke—as in Kiss Me and You’ll Kiss the ’Lasses and Young Husband: First Marketing.

In the latter work, a male shopper (likely modeled by Benjamin Spencer) tries, without much success, to manage an overstuffed basket of poultry and produce, airing his missteps along a city sidewalk.

Further, Spencer could spin a domestic scene into a story with national reach, as in The Home of the Red, White, and Blue, which places women at the center of the efforts to rebuild the country after the Civil War.

Spencer was a hard worker. Painting was more than a passion, it was her livelihood. In 1846 she wrote: “I am now a mother of a family—and however am extremely fond of painting and should like dearly to be able to continue it; but I must endeavor to make it useful to my family as well as agreeable to myself, for indeed we are in need of it!” Embracing the era’s taste for sentiment and commercial prints, she created opportunities again and again to make her pictures work for her. Yet translating her tremendous popular success into financial security remained a constant struggle. While an estimated one million print reproductions of her compositions circulated at midcentury, Spencer saw little return, as the market favored art publishers and consumers above the artists themselves.

Ambitious and savvy, Lilly Martin Spencer forged an artistic career against all odds. Focusing on hearth and home, she opened up her world.

—Annelise K. Madsen, Gilda and Henry Buchbinder Curator, Arts of the Americas

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• Collection
• From the Curator
• Arts of America