Art: Robinson Revisited

“Looking at my things.” Theodore Robinson wrote in his diary, “I feel pretty blue. There are glimmers here and there of refined good painting—but a woeful slackness—a lack of grasp, of inspiration, interest.” Once, on seeing some of his paintings in an exhibition, he spluttered: “My things are bum with one exception, the girl sewing, which has something redeeming.” Actually, Robinson was rarely slack and almost never bum: he was one 19th century American artist who deserves more than the comparative obscurity that has been his fate. Last week a welcome retrospective of his work (see color) opened at Manhattan’s Florence Lewison Gallery, from where it will go to the Albany Institute of History and Art. Impressed by Impressionism. The paintings cover his development from his sharply focused early realism to the sun-swatched impressionism of his later work. He was, in fact, perhaps the first American to be attracted by the impressionists’ vision. But he was never an imitator of his great French contemporaries. Critic John Baur notes that he was always torn between his loyalty to line and solid form and his wish to achieve the effect that the impressionists got by dissolving line and form in color and atmosphere. Robinson never solved the dilemma, but this failure may have been all to the good. What Robinson wanted, as he himself put it, was to attain a delicate balance between “the brilliancy and light of real outdoors and the austerity, the sobriety, that has always characterized good painting.”

The type of painting that many collectors thought good in Robinson’s day was the storytelling picture that would run a sugary gamut from coy to mawkish. Robinson himself turned out a few canvases with titles such as A Canine Patient and A Rail Fence Flirtation, but he did not tolerate that kind of “potboiling” for long. He first went to France when he was only 24, and there he gradually fell under the spell of the new painters. Though the paintings of his good friend Monet made him “blue with envy.” he took away only a fresh appreciation of light and color, which added to his traditional realism rather than replacing it.

Racked by Asthma. In person, according to one acquaintance. Robinson was “far from handsome in the classic sense. An enormous head, with goggle eyes and a whopper jaw, was balanced on a frail body by means of a neck of extreme tenuity; and stooping shoulders with a long slouching gait did not add anything of grace or beauty.” Yet grace and beauty were Robinson’s hallmarks both as a man and as an artist. He was racked by asthma throughout his 44 years, but he let no sense of pain enter his paintings.

He saw the world with an affectionate eye: a stark interior he would somehow make snug; a winter street would lose its chill; and in his scores of landscapes—from his native Wisconsin to Giverny in France to Maine and Vermont—he never showed a storm or the sun as anything but gentle. Robinson may have been a minor figure, but his talent was genuine and warm. It was—as so many of his friends said about his laugh—infectious.