Theodore Robinson (American, 1851-1896) Vermont Hillside Signed 'Theodore Robinson' bottom left, oil on canvas 18 x 27 in. (45.7 x 68.6cm) Executed in 1895. PROVENANCE: The Artist. By descent in the family. Private Collection, Virginia. NOTE: After spending almost ten years painting in France and learning from Impressionist master Claude Monet (1840-1926), Theodore Robinson returned to his native Vermont in 1895. The artist came back to the United States for sentimental reasons, having never felt for his French subjects the strong emotional affinity he felt for the hills of his childhood. For Robinson, Vermont was also the perfect place to paint typically American pictures, and therefore adapt his Impressionistic skills to the grandeur and the vastness of the American landscape. The artist spent the summer looking for the perfect site to paint, confessing: "I am agreeably impressed - it seems to be a country fine in line and not so 'small' as Connecticut, and in a way less ragged." However, Robinson struggled to translate onto his canvas what he had learned in France, finding it difficult to capture the precise atmospheric effects that he wanted, and feeling restrained by a darker, more restricted palette. In June 1895, the artist eventually abandoned his project of an ambitious panoramic view and turned to what he knew best instead: small, intimate vistas. He finally found an isolated hillside with an open view as exemplified in the present work: "It is fine in color and not too green, a field in the foreground full of red, like a French grain-field." See More