Niles Spencer

Born to a prosperous family in the textile industry, Spencer attended Rhode Island School of Design before moving to New York where he studied with Kenneth Hayes Miller at the Art Students League and with George Bellows and Robert Henri. He spent summers among the artists in Ogunquit, Maine. In the 1920s he visited Europe, where he was influenced by the landscape and still life pictures of Paul Cézanne, as well as contemporary cubist art and Italian Renaissance painting. Back in the United States, Spencer would be associated with the emerging Precisionist movement.