William S. Robinson made a career of traveling, from East Gloucester where he was born, to the Académie Julian in Paris in the early 1890s, and on to Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, New London, Old Lyme, and finally, by the 1940s, to Biloxi, Mississippi. In between were painting excursions to Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, and New York State, during which Robinson captured the diverse landscape of the eastern seaboard with a palette that ranged from autumnal and tonal early in his career to brightly impressionistic in the 1920s and 1930s.

Of all the places he journeyed, Old Lyme became his most beloved. Robinson arrived in 1905 and rented rooms in Boxwood, a former hotel just down Lyme Street from his colleagues at the Florence Griswold mansion. He returned every summer until 1921, when he settled in town permanently. Or semi-permanently. After Miss Florence’s death in 1937, Robinson was off again, to rejoin a childhood friend in Biloxi. The paintings he left behind make it easy today to record his movements. Though they were done hundreds of miles apart, they are uniformly lovely, the work of an impressionist master often on the road but always in the moment.