He studied at Newton University in Baltimore, where he was given drawing lessons by August Weidenbach, a landscape painter from Germany.

[6][7][a] He went on a sketching trip in Switzerland in 1866, spent more time in a studio in Paris, and returned to New York late in the fall of 1867.

[8] Soon after returning to America Robbins began spending his summers in the Farmington Valley in Connecticut, making paintings of the river and woods.

He became a trustee of the New York School of Applied Design for Women and a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

[9] His pictures of the White Mountains showed a picturesque pastoral countryside, civilized through roads, cleared hills and fields, but far from the squalor of the city.

[10] A biographer in 1878 wrote, "There was a slight mannerism in Mr. Robbin's early works, which he appears to have dropped entirely within a few years, and is rapidly gaining in an independence and originality that much better becomes him.