Women Artists

Florence Vincent Robinson

Date: c. 1930

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Gift in memory of Margaret Reynolds and Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood

Object number: 2003.1

Text Entries: Florence Robinson's watercolor offers a modest glimpse of part of a building along a quiet street. The upper story windows are shuttered against the bright sun; below, at street level, three doorways of varying heights, one partly sheltered by the drooping fabric of a retracted awning, also present a closed face to the outside. The façade is further varied by shadows cast by tall unseen buildings, suggesting a confined urban setting. The view terminates at the far right just past the corner of the building, beyond which two other tall structures are joined by a closed gate, with a bit of trees and blue sky hinting at a more expansive view beyond. Near the corner, the sketchy figures of a woman and a small child in white provide the only touches of animate life. Robinson's composition, with its cropped buildings and random shadows, seems as casual as her subject.<br><br> This delicate image is said to portray a scene in the Midi region of France, perhaps in the city of Toulon, and to have been made sometime between 1929 and 1931. Robinson spent those years in the resort town of Menton, some 165 kilometers from Toulon. The picturesque region, along with locales in Spain and Italy, furnished many subjects for her watercolor views. Robinson was one of many American artists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries who sought out scenes emblematic of the qualities their compatriots admired in European towns and cities in comparison with their own: an unhurried pace of life, the living presence of history in the tangible form of streets, buildings, and monuments, and a graciously human sense of scale. Robinson's view captures all these qualities with straightforward naturalism and an eye for local detail.