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Dimensions: 18 by 22 in. (45.7 by 55.8 cm)
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Provenance: Estate of the artist
John Cheney Robinson (his brother)
By descent to the present owners
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Exhibited: New York, Society of American Artists, 1896, no. 49
Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Paine Art Center and Arboretum; Memphis, Tennessee, The Dixon Gallery and Gardens; Indianapolis, Indiana, Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Figural Images of Theodore Robinson: American Impressionist, April-November 1987, no. 41, p. 85, illustrated
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Literature: John I.H. Baur, Theodore Robinson: 1852-1896, Brooklyn, New York, 1946, no. 250, p. 79
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Notes: Theodore Robinson's paintings from the late nineteenth century reveal his indebtedness to the Impressionist works of Claude Monet, whom he met in 1887 during his stay in Giverny. In 1892 Robinson returned from France, established his residence in New York City, and began to search for distinctly American subjects to which he could apply his new-found Impressionist technique. He was seeking a place where he felt a personal relationship to his surroundings and the subjects they presented. "Robinson, however, did not seem satisfied with a place for which he had to acquire a taste: he was longing for a countryside that held individual significance for him. He wanted a landscape with which he had some familiarity, and better still, some connection, not just a residence or a hostelry but a native place and one of some age.
"Finally, in 1895, following the example of many of his contemporaries who had found rural New England a personal and artistic magnet, Robinson spent six months in Vermont, near the small town where he had been born. 'I think I am on the right track,' he wrote that November to [his friend Hamlin] Garland, 'my parents came from this country... and after a long stay west, and after that, years in France, have got back to what I believe is my country. It will take time. I am only beginning to see its beauties and possibilities and to feel that affection for a country, so indispensable to paint it well.'
"There Robinson developed ideas about an American art that expressed national sentiments. In his New England landscapes, above all in those of Vermont, Robinson used an Impressionist style particularly suited to capturing the appearance of the local American scene?barns, mills, farmhouses, quaint villages, and mountainous tree-covered countryside. The increased linearity of his American style, a notable departure from French Impressionist precedents, was at least in part prompted by his devotion to representing accurately the landscape he had come to love" (H. Barbara Weinberg, Doreen Bolger and David Park Curry, American Impressionism and Realism: The Painting of Modern Life 1885-1915, New York, 1994, p. 58).
Washing Day exemplifies Robinson's fully realized Impressionist technique, which evolved during his years in Giverny and flourished when he returned to America. As Bev Harrington and William Kloss observe, "Bleaching Linen (Washing Day)... maintains the balance between instinct and learning. A light-filled foreground, easily measured by the patches of cloth laid upon it, and an unpruned spreading tree have a natural ease. The girl with the jib-like triangle of sheet before her qualifies this ease. The sharp diagonal of the sheet 'corrects' the more casual tree limb, and it meets and overlaps the girl's body with a severity that transforms her into a ship's figurehead or even an archaic Greek Kore (Maiden). Nowhere are the twin poles of Robinson's art more clearly stated" (The Figural Images of Theodore Robinson: American Impressionist, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, p. 37).
Robinson spent the summer and fall of 1895 in Townshend, Vermont, at the home of his cousin Agnes Cheney, whose hospitality he noted in his diary that November, ".. . the ridiculous sum of $4. per week was asked and my washing thrown in... She has made the summer exceedingly pleasant for all" (John I.H. Baur, Theodore Robinson, Brooklyn, New York, 1946, p. 48). Washing Day depicts his beloved cousin in a sun-filled meadow, wearing a pink dress and surrounded by white linens. The artist recorded beginning Washing Day in his diary on September 2, 1895: "Took a photo of Mrs. C. and a lot of linen on the grass, about 4.30." A few days later, the artist continued, "I laid in an 18 x 22 of Mrs. C. with the laundry?will introduce the little gray cat?an amusing bit of every-day life" (Baur, p. 79).
Washing Day was owned by John Cheney Robinson, the artist's brother, and has remained in the Robinson family since 1895, the year it was painted.
This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work being compiled by Ira Spanierman and Sona Johnston.
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