During these early years a persistent theme emerged in his work. He often painted realistically rendered rustic genre scenes of single female figures in landscapes somewhat in the earlier manner of Winslow Homer and Eastman Johnson.

In 1884, Robinson returned to France where he remained for eight years, moving soon to Giverny where he became a close neighbor and friend of Monet, frequently enjoying the hospitality and critiques of the aging master. There his painting acquired the attributes of the French impressionist school, the high color and flickering light, the broken brush stroke and repeated diagonal areas of mottled color, but never losing the form and structure of the American aesthetic.

His skills and his proximity to Monet propelled him to the center of the American coterie at Giverny and gave him the authority and influence to communicate impressionist attitudes and techniques to his compatriots.

In 1892 he returned to America to apply his impressionist vision to his native landscape. He worked with Weir and Twachtman at Cos Cob in Connecticut, painted the picturesque canals of New York State, and finally gravitated to a Giverny of his own in his home state of Vermont. But within four years of his return, ill health overcame him and he died alone and penniless. His final canvases, lacking patrons, were auctioned at an estate sale.