Interpretive Resource

Theodore Robinson was among the first of many American artists to paint in the French village of Giverny, where Claude Monet had rented property beginning in 1883. Although Robinson was trained in the academic tradition in New York City and at the Ecole des beaux-arts, Paris, he had already begun to experiment with more diffuse, plein-air painting techniques in the artists’ colonies at Grez and Barbizon before going to Giverny in the late 1880s. Dividing his time between the United States and France for the next several years, Robinson became a student and close friend of Monet, under whose influence he learned to observe and render the effects of light and weather on the bucolic landscape of the area, employing layered, broken brushwork and adopting a pastel-hued palette.

Robinson painted The Valley of Arconville during a trip to France’s Champagne region. This was around the time he met Monet, and the canvas shows his transition to the Impressionist style. Adopting an elevated viewpoint, Robinson depicted a female figure on a hillside overlooking a village and the surrounding landscape. He used loose, sketchy brushwork to lead the viewer’s eye down the grassy slope in the painting’s foreground, and also to establish the hazy atmosphere of the distant horizon. Robinson’s spontaneous, active handling in these areas is balanced by the more deliberately placed, flat patches of color that convey the solidity of the houses in the valley below.

The Valley of Arconville was one of several paintings by Robinson in the 1889 Society of American Artists exhibition, held in New York City; recognized by critics as belonging to "the new school," it helped disseminate the lessons of Impressionism to artists in the United States.