Our Featured Painting:
The Red Gown (His Favorite Model)
by Theodore Robinson
In keeping with his academic training, Theodore Robinson was closely involved with figure painting throughout his career, favoring depictions of women in particular. However, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, he eschewed the fashionable urbaniste and instead focused his attention on depicting quiet, unassuming pastoral types engaged in everyday activities--an aspect of his work that was duly noted by critics, as well as collectors such as Duncan Phillips, who observed: “The . . . wholesome peasant girls he found more charming than the chic Parisiennes and he painted them with only a hint of sentiment.” Robinson’s early association with rural New England and the Midwest helped spark his interest in rustic themes, as did his familiarity with the oils and watercolors of Winslow Homer; at the same time, through visits to the exhibitions of the Paris Salon, he would have become aware of the work of French painters such as Jules Bastien-Lepage and American expatriate painters in France, such as Daniel Ridgway Knight and Charles Sprague Pearce, whose portrayals of contemplative peasant women in bucolic outdoor settings helped popularize the theme, both in Europe and in the United States.

Robinson’s tendency to conjoin his love of figure painting with his concurrent interest in landscape is apparent in this splendid representation of a young woman posed before a blossoming fruit tree. Depicted with her back toward the viewer, the model has been identified as the artist’s close friend, Marie, who Robinson met in the spring of 1884. She appears in a number of paintings from this period—such as Madonna Mia and Reverie—in which she wears the same simple red dress (a preferred studio prop) and stands in an orchard. The setting here was possibly inspired by the scenery of Barbizon, one of Robinson’s favorite haunts during the mid-1880s. According to Sona Johnston, the immense scale of the piece and the formal and somewhat romantic treatment of the figure reflect the impact of Robinson’s involvement with mural decoration in the early 1880s. Indeed, prior to making his second trip to France in the spring of 1884, the artist had worked for both John La Farge (1882) and Prentice Treadwell (1882-84) on decorations for a number of private and public buildings in New York, including the Vanderbilt House and the Metropolitan Opera House, an experience that undoubtedly contributed to his newfound appreciation for large, salon-style formats.

In The Red Gown (His Favorite Model), Robinson employs an abruptly cropped composition that eliminates the foreground and sky and allows us to direct our gaze solely on the carefully posed figure, who retains an air of detachment, oblivious to our presence. Consistent with his former studies with the great realist painter Jean-Lêon Gérôme, he defines his subject with a firm hand, deftly capturing Marie’s delicate profile and slender arms and the firm, almost sculptural folds of her dress, all the while impressing us with his exquisite draftsmanship. By contrast, he imparts a broader handling to the landscape elements, applying his pigment with soft, wispy strokes and avoiding detail and tight contours in order to convey a sense of the fleeting moment—an indication that despite the fact that he had not yet made his way to Giverny, where he met and became friendly with Claude Monet, Robinson was already experimenting with the technical strategies of Impressionism. This is true in terms of both his brushwork and his approach to color. To be sure, as noted by the aforementioned Phillips, Robinson’s “instrument of expression was color and his palette was as individual as that of any painter of his time.” This is certainly the case in the present work, in which the golds, browns and olive greens of the Barbizon School act as a foil to the striking reds of the model’s costume and the luminous tones of her flesh. Deftly applied patches of pink and a soft blue emerge here and there amidst the verdant leafage, adding to the chromatic variety of the composition and demonstrating Robinson’s continuing move away from the muted hues of his early work towards a brighter and more diverse chromaticism.

A superb example of Robinson’s work from the mid-1880s, The Red Gown (His Favorite Model) underscores his penchant for portraying the female figure in relation to the landscape, a theme that played a vital role in his art. At the same time, the canvas can be viewed as a transitional piece in which this talented artist combined his recent experience as a mural painter in the United States with his renewed connection to France, where he would go on to emerge as a pioneering figure in the development of the American Impressionist tradition.

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