Lilly Martin Spencer (British/New York, 1822-1902), "The Centennial", 1895-1902, oil on canvas, unsigned, 54 1/4 in. x 72 1/2 in., in an attractive giltwood frame.
PLEASE NOTE: Provenance: Descended in the family of the artist, Highland, NY, and Ocean Grove, NJ; acquired by a Florida collector. Note: The final masterwork by "the finest American female painter of the mid-nineteenth century", this impressive canvas was found still on the artist's easel at the time of her death, having been worked on for seven years. It represents the 100th birthday celebration of "Aunt Mary" (the sister of the artist's father), surrounded by a large assembly of her family and friends (of whom the figure found in green is probably a self-portrait). Its ambitious scale and pictorial complexity reflect the traditions of mid-Victorian monumental painting, epitomized for example in George Edgar Hick's equally large "Changing Home" of 1862 in The Geffrye Museum, London (a parallel pointed out in Robin Bolton Smith and William H. Truettner, Lilly Martin Spencer: The Joys of Sentiment, (Washington, D.C., 1973). Born Angelique Marie Martin in Exeter, England (of professional French parents who kept a school there), Lilly Martin and her family moved in 1830 to Ohio. Her first exhibition in Cincinnati in 1841 attracted favorable notice, and after half-a-dozen years there (during which she married Benjamin Rush Spencer, who gave up his career in favor of hers) she moved with her husband to New York, where she exhibited at the National Academy and other venues. She had 13 children, but remains an icon as one of the first female professional painters in the history of American art.