Friday, January 28, 2022 – IMAGES OF THE PRIVILEGED IN GILDED AGE NEW YORK
FRIDAY, JANUARY 28, 2022
The 584th Edition
The Crossroads
of
Gilded Age Life,
as Seen by a
Little-Known New York Painter
THEODORE ROBINSON
from Ephemeral New York
&
Smithsonian American Art Museum
By 1895, just about all of Manhattan was urbanized. Central Park, completed only 30 years earlier far north of the main city, was now centrally located. In three years, the consolidation of Greater New York would be complete, and the city would take the shape we know today.
| But the heart of the Gilded Age city was still Madison Square, a crossroads of business, shopping, nightlife, and culture. Above, artist Theodore Robinson painted the corner of Fifth Avenue and 23rd Street with all the action and activity to be expected in the mid-1890s. Missing from Robinson’s painting is the Flatiron Building, of course; the iconic skyscraper didn’t open until 1902. But to the left in the foreground is the Fifth Avenue Hotel, the meeting place of business and political movers and shakers. Farther up is Marble Collegiate Church, built in the 1850s and one of the city’s oldest most elite congregations. |
| from THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART Theodore Robinson was born in Irasburg, Vermont, but at the age of three his family moved to Wisconsin. Robinson’s earliest art study was done at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1869. Soon thereafter, he went to Paris where he continued his studies with conservative masters Carolus-Duran and Jean-Léon Gérôme. Broke and hungry he returned to New York, where he found friendship and employment with John La Farge. Financial considerations recurrently obliged him to teach, a chore he never enjoyed. This may have been because from childhood he suffered severe asthma attacks, which seriously depleted his energy and ultimately led to his premature death.During these early years a persistent theme emerged in his work. He often painted realistically rendered rustic genre scenes of single female figures in landscapes somewhat in the earlier manner of Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson.In 1884, Robinson returned to France where he remained for eight years, moving soon to Giverny where he became a close neighbor and friend of Monet, frequently enjoying the hospitality and critiques of the aging master. There his painting acquired the attributes of the French impressionist school, the high color and flickering light, the broken brush stroke and repeated diagonal areas of mottled color, but never losing the form and structure of the American aesthetic.His skills and his proximity to Monet propelled him to the center of the American coterie at Giverny and gave him the authority and influence to communicate impressionist attitudes and techniques to his compatriots.In 1892 he returned to America to apply his impressionist vision to his native landscape. He worked with Weir and Twachtman at Cos Cob in Connecticut, painted the picturesque canals of New York State, and finally gravitated to a Giverny of his own in his home state of Vermont. But within four years of his return, ill health overcame him and he died alone and penniless. His final canvases, lacking patrons, were auctioned at an estate sale.Emery Battis Artist Biographies for the exhibition American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000) |
Horses power carriages along the paved avenue. Skirt hems skim the sidewalks. You can practically hear the conversation between the smartly dressed young man and the driver. Streetcars travel up and down 23rd Street, ferrying daytime shoppers to grand department stores like Stern Brothers and nighttime theatergoers.
Robinson is a new name for me. Born in Vermont, he came to New York in the 1870s and returned again after stints in Europe, according to the National Gallery of Art. His depiction of Union Square (above), also an important Gilded Age location, seems closer to his pioneering Impressionist style.
Robinson died in New York in 1896 at age 43 after a lifelong fight with severe asthma, per a New York Times review of an exhibit held in 2005. His name isn’t well known, but his work capturing the street life of the Gilded Age lets us feel the energy and excitement of the city on the cusp of the 20th century.
Theodore Robinson, La Vachère, ca. 1888, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.7.58
Theodore Robinson, Old Church at Giverny, 1891, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of William T. Evans, 1909.9.6
| Old Church at Giverny was painted in the summer of 1891 and depicts the west elevation and conical tower of the Church of Sainte Radegonde in the French village of Giverny, located fifty miles from Paris on the River Seine. In the late nineteenth century, France was an international center of artistic training and production and was a popular destination for American painters and collectors. Typically, American artists would settle in Paris but also make regular excursions into the French countryside, where they could paint outdoors. Theodore Robinson was among a group of American painters who began to visit Giverny, where the French impressionist painter Claude Monet had settled in 1883. Robinson’s friendship with Monet greatly influenced his technique in this period and manifested itself most significantly in the loose brushstrokes that indicate color and light. The paintings made by Robinson at Giverny are notable for the absence of the modernity that was sweeping French cities and towns, and appear to emphasize Giverny as a place where man and nature can still live in harmony. |
- Theodore Robinson, At the Piano, 1887, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of John Gellatly, 1929.6.90
- The shiny surface of the piano, the luminescent fabric of the woman’s dress, and the image of fingers stroking ivory keys conjures a variety of textures and sounds. Theodore Robinson painted this scene of a favorite model playing a piano in the Paris apartment of his wealthy friend “Archie” Chanler. Robinson was in love with Marie but never married her. The two spent a great deal of time together in Giverny, where their relationship sparked much gossip among American tourists staying at the elegant Hôtel Baudy. One lodger wrote to her friend the Boston painter Philip Leslie Hale: “By the way, dear, it looks very strange but Mr. Robinson has a model down here who has a little daughter … Everyone says that … the little girl is the daughter of Mr. Robinson [and] the child looks very like him.” (Johnston, In Monet’s Light: Theodore Robinson at Giverny, 2004)
UPCOMING PROGRAM WITH THE NYPL
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FORT WADSWORTH, AT THE FOOT OF THE VERRAZANO BRIDGE IN STATEN ISLAND
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Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Melanie Colter and Deborah Dorff
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Historical Society unless otherwise indicated:
EPHEMERAL NEW YORK
Tags: Fifth Avenue Hotel New York City, Gilded Age New York City Painters, Gilded Age NYC Paintings, Madison Square Gilded Age NYC, Madison Square New York City, Street Life Gilded Age New York, Theodore Robinson Painter
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