American painter Theodore Robinson (1852-1896) was academically trained at The Art Institute of Chicago, the National Academy of Design, and the Art Students League in New York before moving to France in 1876 to study at the École des Beaux-Arts. During his time there, Robinson studied at the atelier of the French painter Jean-Leon Gerome whose interest in Academicism was in line with Robinson’s interest in portraiture.  

In 1877, Robinson had the honor of having his painting titled Une Jeune Fille accepted at the Paris Salon. He went on to exhibit five more times at the Salon during the 1880s. Following his completion of the painting for the 1877 Salon, Robinson spent time in the countryside outside Paris near Fontainbleau and the artist colony of Barbizon. It was an area he would return to in subsequent years to paint en plein air with fellow artists Will Low, Birge Harrison and Walter Launt Palmer. 

In 1879, Robinson returned to New York in a dire financial situation that forced him to abandon his studio on Broadway and return to his family in Evansville, Wisconsin. During this low point in his life, Robinson’s friend Will Low arranged for a teaching position in New York at a school for young ladies, allowing him to return to New York where he could paint with fellow artists. In 1881, Robinson was elected to the Society of American Artists and began to work for the muralist John La Farge. During his years teaching and working in New York, Robinson continued to pursue his own work, travelling in the summers to Vermont and Nantucket where he painted in the early 1880s.

By 1884, Robinson had saved enough money to buy himself passage back to France where he would remain for the next eight years. The following year, Robinson visited the village of Giverny in Normandy with a friend to meet Claude Monet, the progressive Impressionist painter whose work was at the forefront of French art during Robinson’s years in France. Robinson became the leading American disciple of Monet, moving next door to the artist in Giverny in 1887 and painting some of his masterpieces of American Impressionism during this period.

Theodore Robinson painted the work in our upcoming sale, Winter Afternoon-Barbizon, circa 1886, during one of his visits to the countryside outside Paris just before he moved to Giverny. His work from this period focused on the simplicity of the landscape, and the colors and light of the Barbizon and Normandy landscapes. Like his mentor, Robinson was interested in the changing conditions of light and weather, using earthen tones to depict these changes as he immersed himself in his surroundings. In 1892, Robinson returned to the United States, painting in the Connecticut artists colony in Cos Cob, and in Vermont where he was born. His final years were productive but cut short by the acute asthma that had plagued him his entire life. Robinson died in 1896 at the age of forty-three.