After practicing various crafts in factories and on construction sites, Gabriel Robin, who attended five years of evening drawing classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Belleville, set up his studio above the house he built in Aulnay in 1931 in which he shared his time between his profession as a cobbler in the morning, and his passion for painting the rest of the day.

Some of the social issues dealt with by Estève, Pignon, Roger Falck, Georges Ort, Adrien Cumora, Gisèle Delsine, Louis Féron, Fougeron, Marcel Debarbieux and Gabriel Robin with very effective graphic force were Bastille Day (14 July), unemployment, the elite, athletes, colonization and war.

André Lhote and his wife, Simone Camin, were very interested by Robin's colorful research built upon the work of Georges de La Tour, nd they organized his first solo exhibition at the gallery Pittoresque in 1943.

In November and December 2008, his adopted hometown of Aulnay honored him with a retrospective at the Espace Gainville[1] and showed a selection of his works in the exhibition entitled Lights, Colors, Shapes: Creation in France during the Years 1940 – 1950 at the l'Hôtel of Ville of Aulnay-sous-Bois.

In his early years, Gabriel Robin was influenced by Impressionism (Sisley), Fauvisme (Vlaminck, Derain), Cubism (Juan Gris, André Lhote, La Fresnaye).

It is in the early forties that he fully deployed his own style with human figures, landscapes and still life recreated in large colored scapes where the play of light – from violent glow to subtle chiaroscuro – gives birth to a space full of mysteries.

These special lightings inspired by the works of Georges de La Tour give to his paintings a tragic constructive power which reveals the anxiety of the artist about his epoch and his contemporaries.