(“Then Again” is Mark Bushnell’s column about Vermont history.)
[T]heodore Robinson came home to find the American landscape that inspired him. He had spent years painting in France and learning the loose style dubbed impressionism from his close friend Claude Monet. But upon returning to the States, Robinson was frustrated in his efforts to use impressionism to depict the American countryside. That is, until he reached Vermont in 1895.
Robinson returned for sentimental reasons. He had been born in the town of Irasburg in 1852, but his family relocated to the Midwest when he was only 3. Still, he had roots in Vermont, where his parents had been farmers. His uncle Bela Brigham acted as guide as Robinson toured southern Vermont, looking for a site to paint and teach during the summer of 1895.
“I walked around some and am agreeably impressed,” he wrote in his diary. “(I)t seems to be a country fine in line and not so ‘small’ as Connecticut, and in a way less ragged.” Robinson rented a house outside Townshend, overlooking the West River. He planned to paint and teach several female art students who accompanied him, while his cousin Agnes Cheney ran the house and acted as chaperone.
In a small way, Robinson was recreating the scene he had enjoyed in the French village of Giverny, where many American artists made a pilgrimage to bask in the genius of Monet. Monet declined to teach classes, but he offered advice to these visitors. Many of them went on to great fame, forming their own American impressionist movement. But Robinson was Monet’s favorite. The men corresponded for years and Robinson was one of the few guests Monet invited to his wedding.
Robinson won people over with his amiability. Fellow American painter Birge Harrison recalled a summer the two spent in the French countryside with author Robert Louis Stevenson and other artists. “The one who always stands out the most vividly in my own mind … is Theodore Robinson,” wrote Harrison. Robinson, like Stevenson, was in poor health. He suffered severely from asthma. But, Harrison wrote, neither one ever “allowed his weakness to interfere in any way with the main business of life. … His infectious laugh I can hear to this day, and the subdued chuckle with which he met the little contretemps of existence was a tonic and an inspiration to those about him. … (H)is whole person radiated a delightful and ineffable sense of humor.”
Despite his ease at making friends, and his infatuation with several of his models, Robinson never married.
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Giverny was a long way from Wisconsin, where Robinson spent most of his later childhood. His family was supportive of his artistic interests, sending him to study art in Chicago and then at the National Academy of Design in New York City.
But Europe was where the action was. American artists typically chose between art schools in Germany and France. Robinson picked the latter. In 1876, he traveled to Paris to study with Emile Auguste Carolus-Duran, who offered classical art instruction to many Americans, including John Singer Sargent. Robinson later studied with Jean-Leon Gerome, another renowned instructor.
Both teachers were part of the French art establishment, which stressed realism in painting. A group of talented French painters, including Monet, challenged this devotion to realism. These painters weren’t interested in capturing the literal look of their world. Cameras were now doing that. They sought instead to capture the sensation of a fleeting moment. One critic mocked them as merely impressionists – as opposed to realists. Monet and others eventually accepted the term as a badge of honor.
Like many painters of his generation, Robinson drifted away from his formal training and embraced impressionism. He visited Giverny in 1887 and soon rented a small house there. Over the next five years, he spent much of his time in Giverny, painting impressionistic pictures of the landscape and people, in the shadow of Claude Monet.
Monet’s style was radically different from Robinson’s formal training. The Frenchman had a way of depicting the world in shorthand, recording scenes in abbreviated brushstrokes. He painted outdoors, instead of in a studio as academic painters did, and used bright colors to render life.
Robinson struggled to let go of the somber tones and realism he had been taught. For all his work with Monet, and their many long hours of conversation over the dinner table, Robinson never painted as freely as Monet. His works are more linear and representational. He did manage to loosen his style, but the landscapes, structures and figures in his paintings have a solidness to them that art historians link to his earlier training.
Today, Robinson is little known to the general public, but his work is valued by art historians and curators, and to serious collectors. While some of his minor paintings fetch only a few thousand dollars at auction, his sale record is more than $2 million.
But that type of recognition escaped Robinson during his lifetime. He returned to the United States several times in the wintertime to paint and exhibit, though he had little commercial success. He did, however, win the prestigious Webb Award from the Society of American Artists in 1890. The award was sponsored by W. Seward Webb, whose massive farm in Chittenden County is now the nonprofit Shelburne Farms.
Robinson left France for good in 1892. He sought to apply impressionism’s methods to the American landscape. Old associations drew him to Vermont, which is something of a miracle. When he visited the state in 1881, he found it wanting. The scenery was pretty enough, he said, but the rural lifestyle led by his uncle and aunt depressed him. He called it “a most desolate, almost savage country.” And his aunt’s food was almost inedible. “The horrible meals she concocts – hot, heavy biscuits, tea the kind … (that) has a great deal of strength and no pleasant flavor, several kinds of pies and cakes, maple sugar in a little tumbler, no coffee, but that vile tea three times a day. We are devoured by flies – Uncle John wouldn’t have netting [because he] ‘didn’t want his air strained.’ ”
But Robinson saw the state with new eyes when he returned. He wrote Monet that “I have found a country in America that charms as much or almost as much as certain parts of France.” He also wrote to Monet about Vermont’s rural customs, particularly maple sugaring, which he knew would fascinate the Frenchman, who was interested in all things culinary.
Robinson and his entourage arrived in Vermont in May. That June he wrote that he had found a hillside with a view of a nice vista from which to paint: “It is fine in color and not too green, a field in the foreground full of red, like a French grain-field. The farm-houses and barns are a feature – one with difficulty escapes barns anywhere in this country.”
He was glad the landscape had few elms, which he disliked painting. Too many American landscape artists painted elms, Robinson believed. “It all goes with the curious dislike of virility in art that our people have,” he wrote. “…One can hardly imagine (American painter) Winslow Homer painting elms all his days, tho’ he might pines or maple.”
When they weren’t painting, Robinson and his students took carriage rides around the countryside, picnicked beside the West River and went to a circus in Newfane. Lunches were punctuated by mint juleps concocted by one of the students, much to the shock of Robinson’s Vermont relatives.
Robinson displayed his usual charm. Though he quarreled uncharacteristically with one student, he managed to mend the rift. When the student departed that fall, she took with her a neighborhood cat, which she named Theodore Robinson, even though it was a female.
Robinson delayed his own departure until Nov. 26, when he left in the midst of a snow squall. He had enjoyed his stay, but was unsure whether he had painted anything of value. He wrote, however, that painters often don’t know whether they are painting well “until some time after. … Perhaps I have learned the country a little, at least made a start.”
Robinson returned to New York City for the winter. He wrote Monet that he wasn’t sure when he would see him again, since he planned to paint in Vermont the next summer. But he never returned.
Theodore Robinson suffered a fatal asthma attack while staying at the New York apartment of his cousin Agnes Cheney. He was 43.