American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Papageorge Family Collection

Provenance

Private Collection, New York.

Private Collection, Florida.

Exhibited:

"Twenty-Sixth Annual Exhibition," Art Insitute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, November 14-December 25, 1913, no. 340.

"Seventeenth Annual Exhibition," Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 24-June 30, 1913.

"Eighty-Eighth Annual Exhibition," National Academy of Design, New York, New York, 1913 (awarded the Julius Hallgarten 2nd Prize).

"Pennsylvania School of Landscape Painting: An Original American Impressionism," Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, Pennsylvania, September 16-November 25, 1984; also Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., December 14, 1984-February 10, 1985; and The Westmoreland Museum of American Art, Greensburg, Pennsylvania, March 2-May 5, 1985.

"Robert Spencer: Impressionist of Working Class Life," New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, New Jersey, June 18-August 28, 1983, no. 8.

"Robert Spencer: The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds," James A. MIchener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania, June 5-September 19, 2004.

Literature:

Thomas Folk, Robert Spencer: Impressionist of Working Class Life, an exhibition catalogue, New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, 1983, no. 8 (illustrated on front cover).

Thomas Folk, The Pennsylvania School of Landscape Painting: An Original American Impressionism, an exhibition catalogue, Allentown Art Museum, Allentown, 1984, p. 15, fig. 1:12 (illustrated).

Brian H. Peterson, Robert Spencer: The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2004, p. 36, plate 6 (illustrated).

Lot Essay:

Unlike his fellow members of the New Hope School who devoted all their attention to the pastoral landscape of Bucks County, which they often immortalized on their canvases void of any human presence, Robert Spencer dedicated much of his career to portray the local working class and the nearby mills, factories, and warehouses in which they were employed. This choice of subject matter most likely comes from Spencer’s early studying years at the New York School of Art, where he was influenced by Robert Henri, a leader of the so-called Ashcan School, which counted William Glackens, George Luks and John Sloan among its ranks and who extensively depicted the lower classes of New York City.

Through his impressionistic touch and brighter palette however, Spencer revealed the inherent charm and beauty of the workers' quotidien. Under his brush, the subject did not appear vulgar, dirty or unsightly. That is because Spencer did not aim at producing political canvases, nor did he necessarily relate with the tedious, and sometimes precarious aspects of the workers’ daily lives, thus avoiding unecessary pathos. Instead, the artist preferred to focus on the integration of the figures within the landscape, and remained particularly interested in the surrounding buildings. According to art critic Charles Burr Todd in The Philadelphia Record (1916), Robert Spencer aimed “to present (…) the beautiful side of the operatives’ life, the lyrical rather than the tragical.” The present painting is an important canvas by Robert Spencer. It was executed in 1913, a crucial period in the artist’s career–“the best year of his life as a painter” according to Brian Peterson, who lists The Silk Mill as one of at least seven major canvases he produced that decade. That same year, Spencer’s Repairing the Bridge was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and he won one of the gold medals at the Panama-Pacific International Exhibition for The Closing Hour.

The Silk Mill belongs to a series of important paintings depicting local mills, such as Five O’Clock, Grey Mills and One O’Clock (which won an honorable mention at the Art Club of Philadelphia). Todd described our work as “a greyer version of the graver side of the mill operative’s life. It is pay day and they are comparing envelopes and devising ways and means to make both ends meet with the weekly wage.” Although Spencer would later create completely imagined landscapes drawn from the artist’s own fantasies, the work depicts an actual building in Bucks County, which regularly appears in Spencer’s oeuvre: the William Maris Mill, built around 1813 and originally intended as a cotton yarn, until Simpson Company converted it into a silk mill in 1896.

Here, the mill serves as the backdrop of the scene. With its imposing height (five stories high with two stone chimneys) and size (fifty feet wide and one hundred feet deep), the building completely blocks the horizon and dwarfs the local workers at the bottom. Its large gabled roof, partly in the shadows, conveys a menacing, almost ominous feel to the scene, as if the architecture itself acted as a visual representation of the workers’ plight and possible exploitation. All gathered around the gray building, which gives the work its overall grayish palette, they remain anonymous figures, without any individual trait or discernable expressions–they are small dots of color about to be swallowed by the immense factory. Yet, the dappled surface of the canvas caused by the rapid handling of the paint enlivens the composition, which is not entirely monochromatic but rather dotted by subtle variations of color throughout (turquoise, yellow, red and green hues). The presence of the trees at upper left and right (the only hint at a mere perspective), as well as the sliver of bright blue sky across the top of the canvas, help extend the space. Ultimately, they also bring hope and contrast the social commentary of the subject matter, thus reminding the viewer that above all, “it is the human side that interests” the artist, the life and the movement suggested by the mill's activity, which remains the sole subject of the painting.