The diary of Theodore Robinson, an American impressionist

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2004 by Sona Johnston

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Throughout his diary a gentle, if occasionally self-deprecating, humor prevails. However, on March 28, 1896, after visiting the Society of American Artists Annual Exhibition at the American Fine Arts Society on West Fifty-seventh Street, he was uncommonly harsh in his criticism. While praising a few works, he condemned others:

[Willard Leroy] Metcalf [1858-1925] has a brilliant but superficial
exhibit of Gloucester things. [Frank Weston] Benson's [1862-1951] snow
picture seems to me to lack meaning or raison d'etre.... [James
Carroll] Beckwith [1852-1917] has a painfully slick and oily portrait of
a West Point professor in uniform ... [William Anderson] Coffin
[1855-1925] has a numerous exhibit of ugly landscapes--I would hang
myself if nature looked like that.

Two days later, he reported a droll, sadly prophetic account he had read of the proceedings in a courtroom before a judge:

The lawyer for the defendant was urging as a plea the d[efendant]'s
state of health., "a consumptive whose lease was short, and who before
very long would be called to appear before a higher Judge." His honor
called the attorney to order, and said severely: "Please stick to the
case in point, and let us have no invidious comparisons."

This was the final entry in the diary. On April 2 Robinson died during an acute attack of asthma at his cousin Agnes Cheney's apartment on West Fifty-fifth Street.

A traveling exhibition entitled In Monet's Light: Theodore Robinson at Giverny is on view at the Baltimore Museum of Art until January 9, 2005. Sona Johnston is the organizer and curator of the exhibition and the author of its catalogue, which includes an essay by Paul Hayes Tucker. The exhibition is sponsored by the Rouse Company, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Charlesmead Foundation, and the Terra Foundation for the Arts.

(1) The work, titled Une Jeune Fille (no. 1819), is presently unlocated.

(2) John I. H. Baur obtained the four extant volumes of the diary from a descendant of the artist in the course of his research for the 1946 exhibition Theodore Robinson, 1852-1896, held at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York. Baur gave these volumes to the Frick Art Reference Library in 1956. According to Baur, the volumes covering Robinson's earlier years were destroyed (see John I. H. Baur papers [unprocessed], Archives of American Art, Washington, D. C.).

(3) Alice Cheney Ela to Baur, November 1, 1946 (ibid.).

(4) Unless otherwise noted, the quotations in this article are from Robinson's diaries (see n. 2).

(5) The other two are Valley of the Seine (c. 1892; Maier Museum of Art, Randolph-Macon Woman's College, Lynchburg, Virginia) and Valley of the Seine from Giverny Heights (1892; Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.).

(6) A Paris businessman, Ernest Hoschede was an early supporter of the impressionists and owned several works by Claude Monet. Following his bankruptcy in 1878, the Monet and Hoschede households combined. With the death of Monet's wife, Camille (b. 1847), in 1879 and Ernest's abandonment of his family in the early 1880s, Monet and Alice Hoschede formed a relationship.