Robert Carpenter Spencer (1 December 1879 – 11 July 1931) was an American painter who received extensive recognition in his day.

[1] He was one of the Pennsylvania impressionists, but is better known for his paintings of the mills and working people of the Delaware River region than for landscapes.

He spent about a year working for a civil engineering company as a draftsman and surveyor.

[2] In 1906 Spencer moved to the Bucks County area, where Charles Rosen had settled three years earlier.

[3] For a few years Spencer and an artist friend Charles Frederic Ramsey lived in poverty in an extremely dilapidated old house called the Huffnagle Mansion.

[3] Spencer studied with the established landscape painter William Lathrop.

In 1913 he met Margaret Alexina Harrison Fulton (born 1882), a fellow student of Lathrop who was an architect as well as a painter.

[8] In 1916 Spencer, Rae Sloan Bredin, Charles Rosen, Morgan Colt, Daniel Garber and William Langson Lathrop formed The New Hope Group to arrange for exhibitions of their work.

[12] including artist Ann Spencer (artist) Spencer is known for his paintings of figures against a backdrop of factories and apartment houses, in an impressionist style with short, tight brushstrokes.

It depicts the back of run-down houses on the canal, with the lower portions whitewashed and bathed in light, with women doing housework.

[13] A contemporary critic wrote, "Interpreted thro' the temperament of Robert Spencer a squalid motive which most of us would pass daily and regard as hopelessly commonplace is presented in a way to stir our emotions and without losing anything of its truth..."[13] Pierre Bonnard said in 1926 "Mr. Spencer .