Born in Nebraska in 1879 as the son of a Swedenborgian minister, Spencer decided to move to New York City and become an artist after beginning studies in medicine for a brief period. He enrolled at the National Academy of Design in 1899 and later studied with William Merritt Chase and Robert Henri at the New York School of Art. In 1906, Spencer moved to the rural Bucks County region in nearby southeastern Pennsylvania. There he studied with celebrated Bucks County painter Daniel Garber, with whom he lived and apprenticed in 1909, and began to develop the skillful Impressionist technique for which he would become known. Spencer became one of the most visible artists in the New York art world in the early twentieth century. His first major success occurred in 1914, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased one of his major early works, Repairing the Bridge. Soon after, the famous collector Duncan Phillips turned his attention toward Spencer's work, ultimately purchasing eight of the artist's canvases, which are now housed in the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Subsequently in 1915, Spencer attained another coveted achievement, winning a gold medal at the prestigious Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Over the twenty-five years he resided in New Hope, Spencer remained one of the most popular painters in the art colony. Sadly, however, throughout his life, Spencer would suffer from periods of depression, enduring several nervous breakdowns in the 1920s, and in 1931, he took his own life. After Spencer's death, Duncan Phillips, who had become a great friend of the artist, praised Spencer as "a rebel always against the standardized and stereotyped in art." Phillips believed that "there [was] no other painter, not John Sloan or Edward Hopper, more pungently American in expression." Robert Spencer's work is featured in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Carnegie Institute, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, the Detroit Institute of the Arts, and the James A. Michener Art Museum, among numerous distinguished private collections.