"La Débâcle," an 1892 oil by Theodore Robinson, from the exhibition "In Monet's Light."
HARTFORD - "There is always a delightful sense of movement, vibration and life," wrote the painter Theodore Robinson in 1892 in The Century magazine about the work of the Impressionist painter Claude Monet. "Clouds are moving across the sky, leaves are twinkling, the grass is growing." And, he added, "To my mind no one has yet painted out of doors quite so truly."
Of all the admiring Americans who frequented Giverny, the Normandy village where Monet (1840-1926) lived and worked, Robinson (1852-96) was perhaps the most worshipful. But he tuned into Impressionism only gradually. Having trained in Chicago, New York and Paris, and having mastered the tight, high-finish style of academic realism, he was in search of a more challenging mode, and spent a good deal of time looking in France between 1876 and 1892. A series of explorations of the countryside around Paris for landscape possibilities led him, in 1885, to the very small village of Giverny, halfway between Paris and Rouen, where he was introduced to Monet by another landscapist, Ferdinand Deconchy.
Back in Paris in 1886, Robinson saw a show that included a dozen Monets and was captivated by their "color and luminosity," as he wrote to the painter Kenyon Cox. Returning to Giverny the next year, he rented a house with other artist friends attracted to Monet's brand of Impressionism - by then well established - which centered on landscape and the changing effects of light. Robinson soon moved to the Hotel Baudy, a hangout for those who had come to bathe in the master's glow. He stayed there during most of his six sojourns in Giverny, from the spring of 1887 through the end of 1892. Although Monet, busy with his own work, his large extended family, his garden and his success, didn't really take to newcomers, he made room for Robinson in his immediate circle and served as his mentor.
His transformative impact on Robinson as a painter is the subject of "In Monet's Light: Theodore Robinson at Giverny," at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The show, organized by Sona Johnston, senior curator at the Baltimore Museum of Art, displays nearly 60 paintings by Robinson and 9 by Monet.
Deeply affected by Monet's painterly transactions with nature and the ways in which he conveyed its light, Robinson worked on developing an Impressionist style of his own. He lightened his colors and invited the great outdoors - Giverny and its tranquil surroundings - onto his canvas. Focusing on the local terrain, he explored the ways light affected it and played on outdoor figures, trading his academic training for looser brush strokes and a more nuanced approach.
In several Monet-like early landscapes he used quiet colors and a soft, even light. The small "French Farmhouse" (circa 1887) shows a farm compound nestled in a grove of trees, with fields of grain in the foreground. A tiny figure is seen working in a field. The red roofs of the buildings, the pale yellow of the grain, the mild green of the trees and the wispy blue sky appear through a kind of soft haze, and the whole scene is rendered in a range of brush strokes meant to convey different textures.
A little later, he was painting panoramas from the hills above the village, like "A Bird's Eye View" (1889), in which a cluster of buildings angles across the canvas, with farm fields stretching behind them, divided by rows of trees, across a wide river plain. The colors are low-key, becoming more so as they progress toward the horizon. An undated postcard of Giverny gives a similar diagonally oriented view in black and white, as if taken from the same location.
But when compared with Monet's work, these come up somewhat short in spirit and animation. A more revealing comparison is Monet's "Field of Poppies" (1890) paired with Robinson's "Moonrise" (1892). They deal with the same motif: a line of trees, broken by tall, thin poplars that tower above the others, seen across a wide field. In Monet's case, the field is covered with red poppies; the trees are darkly silhouetted against a sky of baby blue and white with a low pile of dark-blue hills on the right. The scene glows with a subdued exuberance, an infectious joy in nature.