kins Matteson and Jerome Thompson began to paint scenes with greater "female influence." Matteson's "Sugaring Off" and Thompson's "Apple Gathering" expressed females in roles of courtship. In retrospect, William Henry Burr acknowledged women of the lower class with a painting titled "The Intelligence Office."
             However, the most important impact came when a woman by the name of Lilly Martin Spencer emerged and began to pave the way for female genre painting. Spencer recognized women as the "moral center" of the nation and depicted them as "properly domestic." Nevertheless, her work was criticized, and she was treated in a condescending manner by most of the New York critics. Both Sartain's Union Magazine of Literature and Art and The Literary World complained about her art, specifically her choices of topic. Her paintings contained "feminine and maternal" subjects. Spencer's painting "Shake Hands?" was her first immediate success bringing praise from the Art Historical Journal for the Cosmopolitan Art Association. "Shake Hands?" depicted a woman baking while expressing a ritual of "male equality." Nonetheless, Spencer soon found herself under more criticism when she displayed a painting entitled "The Young Husband: First Marketing." Correspondent J.K.L. of the National Academy of Design claimed the head of the central figure in the painting was much too large.
             Soon, Spencer began to express sexuality in her paintings. Most
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