The bullet in the easel.(Books about antiques)(The Cities, the Towns, the Crowds: The Paintings of Robert Spencer)(Book Review)

In 1970, nearly forty years after her father shot himself, Margaret Spencer found the fatal bullet embedded in the immense easel he built in his studio in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Robert Spencer was fifty-one when he committed suicide, after a career as one of the most exhibited and successful of the group of artists known as the Pennsylvania impressionists. However, while most of the others painted cheerful snow scenes and villages, Spencer worked in a muted palette and chose as his subjects the tenements and mills along the canals of the Delaware river and the people who lived and worked in them. A Boston newspaper critic summed up these scenes with great vividness: "Out of the grime and smoke and deadly commonplace of the mills, the ugliness of the tenement houses, the sickening squalor of a row of unpainted shacks lining the farther side of a canal, [Spencer] manages to extract the 'fleur du mal,' the blossom of beauty emerging from the slime of the gutter."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The artist was born in Nebraska, the son of an itinerant Sweden-borgian minister, and, as a keen genealogist found that his family tree included an earl of Spencer. However, his favorite ancestor was a pirate who roved the Caribbean Sea in the service of Queen Elizabeth I. Spencer married Margaret Fulton, a painter and architect and a descendant of the artist and engineer Robert Fulton. She grew up comfortably in Philadelphia, where her mother was painted by Thomas Eakins. The Spencers were alternately madly in love with each other or "positively thrived on battles--high-pitched, screaming tirades," according to one of the reminiscences left by their daughter Margaret, known as Tink. Spencer took his revenge for these scenes by using himself and his wife as models for paintings ironically entitled Happy Family and Alann Clock. The first, quite reminiscent of the work of Honore Daumier, one of Spencer's favorite artists, shows Spencer dressed and kneeling, fending off an enraged Margaret, who has leaped out of bed and nearly out of her night-dress and is grappling with her husband. On the floor sits a yowling baby. Alann Clock shows a disheveled grumpy Spencer sitting up in bed, while Margaret prepares to wrench the covers off.

Sometimes to recover from these fights, Spencer would flee to New York City for weeks at a time to paint the waterfront in Harlem, or his wife would retreat to a building on their property that contained a studio, kitchen, and bedrooms. She held the only key.

In another mood, Spencer was a convivial companion who was welcomed by the most hospitable of ...