Robert McDougall Art Gallery label affixed verso (Group Jubilee Exhibition, 1977)

Following her arrival from England in 1920 the young Olivia Spencer Bower became a pupil of Rangi-ruru Girls School, Christchurch. Encouraged by her mother, the artist Rosa Bower, Olivia established a reputation as one of New Zealand's most gifted young watercolourists. Eventually she became one of the few women artists of her time able to supported herself financially and pursue a career as a professional artist. Spencer Bower studied at the Canterbury College School of Art with fellow artists Rita Angus and Rata Lovell-Smith. Her tutors included Cecil Fletcher Kelly, Richard Wallwork, Leonard Booth and Archibald Frank Nicoll.

Returning to England in 1929 Spencer Bower studied at the Slade School, London under tutor Henry Tonks . From here, several extended trips were made to Europe before the artist's return to New Zealand two years later. Back in Christchurch Spencer Bower was invited to exhibit with The Group. This small reactionary collective of artists believed the Canterbury Society of Arts to cater for popular taste alone, thereby excluding younger, more adventurous painters. Members of The Group included Louise Henderson, Doris Lusk, Ngaio Marsh and Evelyn Page.

In 1943 Spencer Bower travelled to Northland where she painted with Sydney Lough Thompson, newly returned from Brittany. Later that year she enrolled at Auckland's Elam School Art, continuing her studies under John Weeks , Anna Lois White and A J C Fisher. The following years saw Spencer Bower visit Queenstown and Kaikoura whilst caring for her aged mother. After her mother's death in 1960, Spencer Bower spent three months exploring the Pacific Islands, visiting Fiji, Samoa and Tahiti. On her return she exhibited fifty seven island paintings at the Canterbury Society of Arts. Several trips were made to Europe in the mid 1960s. In 1980 at the age of 75, she received the Canterbury Society of Arts' silver medal for services to visual arts.

Spencer Bower was a colourful figure in New Zealand art circles, easily recognisable at gallery openings by the picture hats she favoured and the cheroots she habitually smoked. The artist never married, and before her death in 1982, she established a foundation to finance artists' scholarships now funded by her estate. Spencer-Bower worked competently in numerous mediums including watercolour, acrylic and oil, as well as producing a number of linocut and woodblock prints.