Boardman Robinson

Born in Canada, Boardman Robinson left Somerset, Nova Scotia, in 1894 for Boston, where he studied at the Massachusetts Normal Art School under E. Wilbur Dean Hamilton. He continued his art studies in 1898 and 1899 in Paris. After moving to New York in 1904, he worked for a year at the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor before joining Vogue as an art editor. Robinson began contributing cartoons to newspapers and journals including the Morning Telegraph, New York Tribune, Collier’s, Harper’s, and Scribner’s. An advocate for socialist politics and worker’s rights, he also drew for leftist magazines such as The Masses and The Liberator. During World War I, Robinson served as a war correspondent for Metropolitan Magazine with the journalist John Reed. Upon his return, he began teaching at the Art Students League in New York in 1919 and stayed until 1930 when he moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to serve as director of the art school at the Broadmoor Art Academy and its successor, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, where he remained until 1946. Concurrently, he became one of the original faculty members at the just opened Fountain Valley School, a boarding school for boys. While teaching, Robinson illustrated several books, including three by the Russian novelist, Fyodor Dostoyevsky. In addition to painting murals at the Department of Justice building in Washington, DC, in 1937, he had previously produced murals for Rockefeller Center in New York City in 1932 and a ten-panel mural in 1929 on the history of commerce at the Kaufmann department store in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.