Frederick Cayley Robinson was a significant painter of the late 19th and early 20th century who embraced European Symbolism and the visionary medievalism of the Pre-Raphaelites to create a highly distinctive and celebrated oeuvre.
 
Farm Buildings, dating to circa 1889 is a relatively early example by Robinson, painted not long after completing his studies at the Royal Academy School, after which he sailed the British coastline, and fell under the spell of the Newlyn School in Cornwall, who were painting in a naturalistic style indebted to the French Realist painter Jules Bastien-Lepage. The painterly surface and soft modulated colours of Farm Buildings reveals this influence. It also contains a sensibility to rendering light and a quiet contemplative quality that was a steadfast characteristic throughout Robinson's work.

in 1891 Robinson went to Paris, as was the path for serious artists to develop their career, and enrolled at the renowned Academie Julien. He completed his training in 1894 and at the close of the decade spent time in Florence to study the Old Masters, where he also first experimented with tempera, a medium he came to master. Robsinson lived in France from 1900-04 with his wife and daughter before returning to London, and honing his distinctive style of simplified forms, rhythmic lines and carefully constructed compositions that reveal the influence of his European experiences, from Renaissance masters such as Pierre dello Francesca and modern Symbolist painters such as Pierre Puvis de Chavannes.

Robinson also became a renowned book illustrator, theatre designer and mural painter, one of his most notable commissions being his Acts of Mercy for Middlesex Hospital, completed in 1920 (now part of the Wellcome Trust collection). Robinson's works are held in public collections throughout Britain, with one of his most famous being Pastoral (1923-4, Tate Britain).