Early years Boardman Robinson was born September 6, 1876, in
Nova Scotia. He spent his childhood in England and Canada, before moving to Boston in the first half of the 1890s. Robinson worked his way through
normal school, following a program to learn
mechanical drafting. The couple moved to Paris where Robinson briefly worked as art editor for
Vogue, before returning to the United States in 1904.
Career Upon returning to the United States, Robinson worked as an illustrator, drawing cartoons and theater illustrations for the
New York Morning Telegraph. He
freelanced for a wide range of other popular publications, including ''
Pearson's Magazine, Scribner's Magazine,
Collier's,
Harper's Weekly,'' and others. In 1910, Robinson took a job on the staff of the
New York Tribune drawing editorial cartoons, a position which he retained for four years. With the eruption of
World War I in 1914, Robinson's increasingly
radical anti-militarist political views brought him into conflict with his employer and he quit the publication. , Washington, (1937) In 1915, Robinson travelled to Eastern Europe on behalf of
Metropolitan Magazine along with journalist
John Reed. The pair saw first hand the effects of the European war in
Russia,
Serbia,
Macedonia and
Greece. In 1916 Reed's account of the journey was collected in a book called
The War in Eastern Europe, to which Robinson contributed illustrations. On his return from Europe, Robinson worked at the
socialist monthly
The Masses. His highly political cartoons as well as the general anti-war stance of
The Masses was deemed to have violated the recently passed
Espionage Act of 1917, and
The Masses had to cease publication. Robinson, along with the other defendants were acquitted on October 5, 1918. Following
The Masses, Robinson became a contributing editor to
The Liberator and
The New Masses, working with former
Masses editor
Max Eastman. Robinson would later go on to teach art at the
Art Students League in New York City (1919–30) and head the
Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center (1936–47). Some of his students include
Duard Marshall,
James Brooks,
Bill Tytla,
Edmund Duffy,
Jacob Burck,
Russel Wright,
Eric Bransby,
Rifka Angel, Mary Anne Bransby, Gerhard Bakker, Bernard Arnest, and
Esther Shemitz (who married
Whittaker Chambers): both Burck and Shemitz contributed illustrations to The
New Masses as did their mentor.) Robinson is also known as a muralist. Some of his mural commissions include works at
Rockefeller Center and the
Department of Justice Building in Washington, D.C., and a nine-panel mural on the
History of Trade for
Kaufmann's flagship department store in
Pittsburgh completed in 1929. Robinson also illustrated several books, among them editions of
Walt Whitman's
Leaves of Grass (1921),
Dostoyevsky's
The Brothers Karamazov (1933),
Edgar Lee Masters'
Spoon River Anthology (1941), and
Herman Melville's
Moby Dick (1942).
Death and legacy Robinson died on September 5, 1952, in Stamford, Connecticut. ==Footnotes==