In December last year, Sotheby's reported that nearly half of the $7.3 billion worth of art it sold that year, was acquired by first-time buyers. It also revealed that 44% of the auction house’s bidders this past year were first timers, including younger collectors.

Born in 1822 in Ohio, Lilly Martin Spencer is recognised as one of America’s most important mid-century genre painters. Spencer monopolised the middle classes growing demand for prints that were used to decorate middle-class homes.

Between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Italian Renaissance evolved to become one of the most significant periods of art history. As its name implies, the Renaissance was considered a ‘re-birth’ of the bygone Greek and Roman cultures, that, during the Middle Ages, had been condemned as paganism and an insult to Christianity.