Village on the Gulf

Albert Henry Robinson was born on January 2, 1881, in Hamilton, Ontario. He began drawing as a young student and after finishing high school, took a job at the Hamilton Times newspaper as an illustrator, drawing murders, accidents, and other news events for $5 a week from 1901 to 1903. During this time, he studied at the Hamilton Art School under John S. Gordon, who later married artist Hortense Mattice Gordon, a member of Painters Eleven.

After several years at the newspaper, Robinson had saved enough to travel to Paris in 1903. He studied at the Académie Julian under William Bouguereau and Bashet, producing work of sufficient quality to gain entry into the École des Beaux-Arts, where he studied with Gabriel Ferrier. He also studied with artist Thomas William Marshall. For two summers in 1904 and 1905, Robinson traveled and painted in Normandy and Corsica. After a bout with typhoid, he returned to Hamilton in 1905, where John Gordon hired him as a studio assistant. He also began teaching life classes at the Hamilton Art School.

In 1906, Robinson exhibited his paintings for the first time and sold his first oil painting to Ontario Lieutenant-Governor J.M. Gibson. Around 1907, he began painting Canadian landscapes in oil. About 1908, Robinson met William Davis and his wife, who sponsored him to paint out of a studio in Montreal. Through the Davises, he met other artists and became friends with three important painters: Maurice Cullen, William Brymner, and Edmund Dyonnet. He began painting Montreal harbor scenes and Quebec landscapes.

In 1910, Robinson met A.Y. Jackson and they became good friends. In 1911, the two artists sailed to Europe together to paint, visiting St. Malo and Carhaix in Brittany, where Robinson sketched along the French coast. After four months, Robinson became homesick and short of money and returned to Montreal. Robinson was elected an Associate of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts in 1911.

When World War I was declared, Jackson went into the army while Robinson worked in the war industry as inspector of munitions at Longue-Pointe, Quebec from 1914 to 1918. In 1918, Robinson was commissioned by Canadian War Memorials to paint the Vickers Shipbuilding plant in Montreal. Many of his canvases from this period are now in Canadian war collections. He became an Academician of the Royal Canadian Academy in 1920.

After the war, from about 1918 to 1933, Robinson painted rural Quebec on sketching trips along the St. Lawrence River and in the Laurentians with Jackson, Clarence Gagnon, Edwin Holgate, and Randolph Hewton. In 1921, he painted with Jackson at Cacouna where he made studies for "Returning from Easter Mass" (1922), now in the Art Gallery of Ontario collection. This painting was later selected for reproduction in the Sampson-Matthews silkscreen project. Despite traveling to the south shore of the Saint Lawrence River with Jackson in 1921, Robinson preferred to paint the north shore, making annual trips throughout the 1920s and into the early 1930s to Beaupré and Charlevoix counties, including Baie-Saint-Paul, Murray Bay, Saint-Fidèle, and Saint-Tite-des-Caps.

Robinson exhibited "The Open Stream" (1923) at the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1925. This painting was then shown in Paris where it was purchased in 1932 by the French Government. In 1920, Robinson was invited to participate as a guest exhibitor at the inaugural exhibition of the Group of Seven in Toronto.

Robinson's work was characterized by a high-keyed palette with crisp, square-edged brushstrokes. He used the rolling rhythm of landscape parallel to the picture plane similar to A.Y. Jackson, but endowed his work with unusual colors including corals, pinks, and dark blue. He sought simplified, powerful form. His vision of Quebec was idyllic, depicting rural landscapes caught in prisms of snow banks and snowflakes. His personal vision and technique represented a spontaneous and lifelong method barely modified from his earliest Impressionist studies done in France.

Robinson began to battle ill health in the late 1920s. He had a successful solo show in 1926 but could not produce enough new works for another show the following year due to his health. Due to a heart attack followed by arthritis, he was forced to retire from painting by 1936, more than a decade before his death. The Art Gallery of Hamilton and National Gallery of Canada held a retrospective show in 1955. Robinson died on September 7, 1956, in Montreal.

Robinson was a member of the Pen and Pencil Club of Montreal and the Arts Club of Montreal. His work is held in collections including the National Gallery of Canada, Art Gallery of Ontario, Art Gallery of Hamilton, McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.