Theodore Robinson (1852–1896) was born on 3 June 1852 in Irasburg, Vermont, the son of a Methodist minister. When he was a small boy the family moved west, and he grew up in Evansville, Wisconsin. He studied briefly in Chicago and then, from 1874, at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League in New York. He later worked in Paris and Barbizon in France.
From 1887 to 1892 Robinson lived at Giverny, where he became a close friend of Claude Monet and was greatly influenced by him. He is generally considered the leading American Impressionist and one of the first American painters to adopt the style, although he received little recognition in his lifetime. In December 1892 he settled again in New York, taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and other schools, and painted in upstate New York, New Jersey and Vermont. His diaries from 1892 to 1896 are a valuable record of early American Impressionism.
Robinson died on 2 April 1896 in New York City, of an acute asthma attack, aged 43.