He subsequently studied at the Académie Colarossi and the École des Beaux-Arts, both in Paris, where he was influenced by the political cartooning of Honoré Daumier, as well as Forain and Steinlen.

[4] The couple moved to Paris where Robinson briefly worked as art editor for Vogue, before returning to the United States in 1904.

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.

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 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).