Theodore Robinson

Theodore Robinson was born June 3, 1852, in Irasburg, Vermont, and grew up largely in Evansville, Wisconsin, where a childhood bout with asthma first limited him and where he attended the local seminary. He enrolled briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1869 but left after a short time as his asthma worsened. In 1874 he moved to New York and took classes at the National Academy of Design, where he won a medal for life drawing, and at the Art Students League.

In 1876 Robinson traveled to Paris, studying in the studio of Carolus-Duran and at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in the atelier of Jean-Leon Gerome. A painting, Une Jeune Fille, was accepted to the Paris Salon in 1877. He moved between France and the United States over the following decade, and from about 1887 to 1892 he lived for extended periods in Giverny, where he became a close friend of Claude Monet and one of the first American painters to work directly alongside him, absorbing Impressionist color and technique while retaining a more structured, drawing-based approach.

Back in the United States, Robinson exhibited with the Society of American Artists, showing his Impressionist paintings there for the first time in 1889, winning the Webb Prize in 1890 for Winter Landscape, and the Shaw Prize in 1892 for In the Sun. In March 1892 he held his first large exhibition, shared with Theodore Wendel, at the Williams and Everett Gallery in Boston. Three of his paintings were included in the American painting exhibit at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In his final years he painted extensively in Connecticut alongside fellow American Impressionists J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman, and in early 1896 he wrote to Monet about returning to Giverny. He suffered from chronic asthma throughout his life, and on April 2, 1896, he died of an acute asthma attack in New York City at age 43. He was buried in his hometown of Evansville, Wisconsin.

Robinson is consistently treated by museums and scholars as a pivotal figure in the transmission of French Impressionism to American painting, valued specifically for the years he spent at Giverny in close contact with Monet and for combining Impressionist light and color with a more disciplined, academically trained sense of composition. His prizes from the Society of American Artists in 1890 and 1892, and his inclusion in the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, marked him as a recognized figure within his own lifetime, while his premature death in 1896 has since framed him in retrospective accounts as a transitional artist whose full maturation was cut short. No verbatim critical quotations from named critics could be confirmed from the available sources for this profile.

Robinson's auction record is reported at USD 2,150,000, for A Normandy Garden, October at Christie's New York on May 24, 2005, per a single secondary source. Independent market research could not corroborate this exact figure against major auction databases, which instead surface a range of high results: MutualArt cites a top realized painting price of up to USD 1,496,000 without disclosing the title, house, or date, Auctie cites the oil Boats at a Landing at roughly EUR 1.6 million without disclosing house or date, and Heritage Auctions lists its own in-house record at USD 645,000, sold May 12, 2023. Beneath this upper tier, results vary widely: works on paper have sold for well under USD 50,000, and overall volume at auction is modest for an artist of his historical stature, which is typical for a 19th-century painter with a small, largely museum-absorbed body of work. No published catalogue raisonne currently exists, so provenance and exhibition history carry unusual weight in supporting both attribution and price.

Robinson has been deceased since 1896, and there is no artist estate or single gallery holding formal representation; his paintings surface today through secondary-market specialists such as Mark Murray Fine Paintings and Spellman Gallery, and through the major auction houses. The absence of a published catalogue raisonne means that provenance, exhibition history, and museum or scholarly opinion are the primary tools for confirming attribution. Because relatively few of his paintings come to market in any given year, individual sale results, including the reported USD 2.15 million high, should be read as data points from a thin, historically driven market rather than as evidence of a smooth pricing trend, and the exact high figure should be re-verified against a primary auction-house archive before being treated as settled.