Theodore Robinson (American, 1852-1896). Jamaica, Vermont, 1895. Oil on canvas. 9 x 13-1/4 inches (22.9 x 33.7 cm). Date...

Description

Theodore Robinson (American, 1852-1896)
Jamaica, Vermont, 1895
Oil on canvas
9 x 13-1/4 inches (22.9 x 33.7 cm)
Dated and titled lower left: Jamaica, Vt. / April 10, 1895

PROVENANCE:
Kennedy Galleries, New York;
Brock & Co., Carlisle, Massachusetts;
Questroyal Fine Art, New York, 2008;
Private collection, Summerville, South Carolina.

EXHIBITED:
New York, Kennedy Galleries, "Art of America: Selected Paintings and Sculpture," 1770-1981, 1981-1982, no. 22.
Gainesville, Georgia, Quinlan Art Center, 1986;
New York, Kennedy Galleries, "On the Spot: A Century of Landscapes by American Artists," 1996, no. 35;
The Bennington Museum, Bennington, Vermont, "Masters of Impressionism and Beyond," August 4-October 31, 2007, p. 40, illustrated.

LITERATURE:
M. Bushnell, Then Again: American impressionist found inspiration in Vermont, Montpelier, Vermont, October 8, 2017, n.p., illustrated;
J. Franklin, From France to the Green Mountains: Impressionism in Vermont, Walloomsack Review, Spring 2014, p. 35, illustrated.
Masters of Impressionism and Beyond, Bennington, Vermont, 2007, p. 40, illustrated.

Theodore Robinson, born in Irasburg, Vermont, was one of the earliest and most significant American artists to embrace Impressionism. Beginning in the late 1880s, many Americans gravitated toward the small French village of Giverny, northwest of Paris, drawn by the presence of Monet. Robinson arrived in Giverny around 1888 and came to be one of the few Americans the French master considered a friend. As a neighbor of Monet for more than four years, Robinson absorbed and adapted the Impressionist mode in his own work - his already painterly brushwork loosened further and his color palette brightened.

Robinson returned to America in 1892 and immediately set out teaching and espousing the ideals of the Impressionist style. In 1895, Robinson returned "back to what I believe is my country," the state of Vermont, for a summer of painting and teaching. There, Robinson devoted himself to painting the region's rural villages, broad valleys, and sloping hills. His Vermont landscapes, which he found a little solider, better grasped, firmer" than those he had produced in France, would be his final legacy. This trip resulted in what are undoubtedly the earliest Impressionist paintings of the Green Mountains, including this fresh, spontaneous plein air sketch Jamaica, Vermont.

Painted on April 10, 1895, Jamaica, Vermont lays bare the selective properties of vision, the artist's particular impression of a scene, translated through the artistic frame. Such is the effect of Impressionism, and Monet's influence is discernable in the painting's varied brushwork and high horizon line, which create an immediate effect of ornamental flatness." Yet even as Robinson adopted Monet's vigorous handling and heightened surfaces, he remained faithful to the muted tones, solid construction, and volumetric realism of the American tradition.

Jamaica negotiates a complicated range of flatness and depth, shifting between two and three dimensions. This results largely from Robinson shifting between the conventions of French Impressionism, which dissolves solid form in light and atmosphere, and those of American landscape painting, which emphasizes volume, perspective, and mass." As Robinson adapted his French method to the landscape and art world of the United States, he developed an increasingly complex personal style-showing the beginnings of an evolution from Impressionism to abstraction. Sona Johnston, the curator of the 1973 Robinson retrospective, explains how "the disintegration of recognizable forms, ambiguous spatial relationships, and a freedom in the use of medium all imply the search for new methods of expression which consumed Robinson upon his return to America."

In Jamaica, the viewer can gain no static, stable perspective; as the hills swell and recede warped by Robinson's crisscrossing lines of green, blue, red, and white-notions of foreground and background, space and distance, disappear. The vitality of the brushstrokes and decisive cropping of the work make the viewer acutely aware of the artist's presence, locking the image in a constant process of conception. Robinson is felt in each insistent brushstroke and at each edge of the composition; we see the landscape through his distinctive vision.


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