American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Papageorge Family Collection

Literature

Thomas Folk, The Pennsylvania Impressionists, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Madison; and Associated University Press, London, 1997, plate 33 (illustrated).
James M. Alterman, New Hope for American Art, Jim's of Lambertville, Lambertville, 2005, p. 524 (illustrated as from the "Collection of the retired CEO of a New York lending institution, Bucks County, Pennsylvania).
Brian H. Peterson, Robert Spencer: The Cities, The Towns, The Crowds, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2004, p. 9737, plate 37 (illustrated).

Note

Robert Spencer's career in the early 1910s was characterized by a vast production of works featuring mill scenes set in the bucolic region near his home of New Hope, Pennsylvania. Following this decade, Robert Spencer started to venture outside of his adopted Bucks County, and his attention shifted towards New York City’s rivers and harbors.

The present work is staged along the titular Harlem River, a view which many artists before Spencer were inspired to depict. Contrary to an Ernest Lawson, however, Spencer does not set his easel in the more rural parts of the riverflow, but instead in the middle of an urban setting, close to the bustling city itself, where he was able to simultaneously record the day-to-day life of the working class. The artist himself confessed: “It is the human side that interests me...a landscape without a building or a figure is a very lonely picture to me. I love the cities, the towns–the crowds...."

With its signature detailed, tight brushwork and overall flat effect (almost fresco-like), Spencer captures the vitality of the dock, and achieves a harmonious integration of the workers within their landscape. Contrary to his contemporary Ashcan colleagues, he uses a bright palette (which includes yellow, purple, green, blue, red and brown) more so characteristic of his 1920s productions, to enliven the scene, which in turn conveys a dynamic, almost joyous, atmosphere that belies the harsh context. The work was indeed created at the turn of the Great Depression, as shown by the shanty boat at center, which contrasts with the richer schooner on the other bend.

In leaving Bucks County, Spencer strove to reveal the beauty within more unexpected places–a radical approach compared to that of his mentor and friend, Daniel Garber, who preferred to erase any reference to urbanization and industrialization from his canvases. According to Brian Peterson, “by focusing so intensely and realistically on the seamier, less obviously beautiful side of life,” Spencer probably reacted “against the sentimental and utopian tendencies that captivated so many other painters of his day.” However, he did so without ridicule or sarcasm, and far away from the journalistic approach that Ashcan artists adopted at the turn of the century, which either echoed pre-Depression blues or forced the viewer's compassion. Spencer’s approach to workers is the most sincere: familiar yet distant. Harlem River features several of them carrying their heavy shift at left. None are stopping, whether to look at us, to pose or to rest; life is happening and they are simply part of a larger city scene depicted without any artifice or sentimentalism.