Image size of this print is 26 x 21 inches with ample margins

NICHOLAS LONGWORTH WARD by Lilly Martin Spencer (c.1870).

In 1830 the eight-year-old Ang�lique Marie Martin, called Lilly, was brought to the United States from her native England. Her mother and father, a politically progressive couple of French extraction, raised their daughter in the small town of Marietta, Ohio. When her artistic abilities and ambitions outstripped the cultural resources available there, her father took her to Cincinnati, where she studied with the portrait painter John Insco Williams.

At 22, Lilly Martin married Benjamin Rush Spencer. They made their home first in New York City, then in Newark, New Jersey, and then moved into a large house in Highland, New York, across the Hudson River from Poughkeepsie. The Spencers had 13 children, seven of whom survived to adulthood; Lilly was the family's principal breadwinner, while Benjamin managed their growing household. In the late 1840s and 1850s, the artist became popular in Europe and America for her still-life and portrait paintings, and especially for her humorous domestic genre scenes.

Spencer exhibited her paintings at the National Academy of Design and was represented at the Women's Pavilion of the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. She also produced work for a number of prominent patrons. However, much of Spencer's fame resulted from the widespread sale of inexpensive engraved copies of her oil paintings.