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N.Y. Herald
Sunday June 19th

"TRUTH UNVEILING FASEHOOD"
Under this rather ominous title Mrs. L.M. Spencer has made a very ambitious attempt, which is quite a different thing from making a very good picture. We think we have seen some reasonably good works of this artist, with reasonable subjects, such as might be fairly supposed to be within the range of an ordinary intelligence, and they were not without merit of a certain kind—intelligibility; but one is rather staggered to be shown a farrago of allegorical and metaphysical balderdash, and coolly told that it "must be strictly consistent with the facts or ideas to be represented". It would be a question quite beyond the province of the critic, as it is evidently beyond the power of the artist, to decide what is the relation between ignorance and falsehood or to what extent innocence and ignorance might be considered as either antithetic or antagonistic. 
One does feel rather inclined to inquire what more reasonable motive than exuberant Americanism could have prompted the lugging in of the idea of the divine right of kings with which selfishness that "brutal monster" appears to be invested.
The drawing, if we may be permitted to judge these creatures of the imagination by any human standard, is pretty poor throughout. The color is worse. In the group where the artist has come nearest to nature and common sense—the mother and her babe—there seems to have dawned a lucid interval, and there is a touch of real feeling and tenderness. In sensational works of this character there is so much to get rid of before one comes to the real art at all, and so little of that when it is gotten at, that the whole thing, intangible as meaningless, vanishes as soon as it is approached and touched.

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---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-12-15 17:13:03