Robert William Wood was born on March 4, 1889, in Sandgate, Kent, England, near the White Cliffs of Dover. His father, W.L. Wood, was a Victorian painter who recognized and supported his son's artistic talent from an early age. At age twelve, Wood enrolled at the South Kensington School of Art in nearby Folkestone, where he distinguished himself by winning four first awards and three second awards for his paintings. His formal artistic education provided him with a solid foundation in traditional landscape painting techniques that would serve him throughout his career.

In 1910, Wood emigrated to the United States with his friend Claude Waters, initially settling in Illinois where he worked as a hired hand on Waters' uncle's farm. Seeking independence and artistic inspiration, Wood adopted an itinerant lifestyle, traveling across America by hopping freight trains and supporting himself by selling or bartering small paintings along the way. During hard times, he took whatever jobs were available, but this nomadic period allowed him to see most of the United States and develop a deep appreciation for rural America that would inspire his work for decades. By 1912, he had reached Los Angeles and later that year met and married Eyssel Del Wagoner in Florida.

Wood's family life was marked by frequent relocations during the 1910s and early 1920s, moving between Ohio, Seattle, Kansas, Missouri, California, and Portland, Oregon. In 1919, his son John Robert Wood was born in Seattle. Eventually settling in San Antonio, Texas, Wood found the stability he needed to pursue painting seriously. There he studied with José Arpa, an academy-trained Spanish artist who was one of San Antonio's best-known painters, and became familiar with the work of recently deceased Texas painters Robert and Julian Onderdonk. Wood established a reputation for well-painted landscapes of familiar Texas scenes, particularly fields of Texas bluebonnets and the red oaks of central Texas. He divorced his first wife in 1925 and married his second wife, Tula, while living in San Antonio.

After seventeen years in Texas, Wood moved to Laguna Beach, California, in 1942, where he joined an established artist colony that included painters from the California Plein-Air School. He became an active member of the Laguna Art Association and exhibited at the annual Laguna Festival of the Arts, gaining recognition for his landscapes and marine paintings of the California coast. Seeking seasonal variety, Wood later moved to the art colony of Woodstock, New York, where he painted high-key fall scenes that were quickly reproduced by print companies. However, after a few years, he and Tula returned to Laguna Beach, where they divorced in 1952.

Wood's personal life took another dramatic turn in 1953 when he was nearly killed after being hit by a car on Pacific Coast Highway. Caryl Price, an amateur artist who helped him during his recovery, soon became his third wife. Wood taught Caryl to paint and took her on sketching trips throughout the American West. During the 1950s, Wood achieved unprecedented fame through the mass reproduction of his work. His reproduction "October Morn" sold more than 1.25 million copies in less than two years, and millions of his prints found their way into American homes and even abroad. In the early 1960s, Wood and Caryl moved to Bishop, California, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

Wood's later years were marked by continued productivity and recognition. In the 1960s, his original paintings commanded prices exceeding five thousand dollars, and at age eighty, the American Express Company commissioned him to create a series of six National Parks paintings for limited edition serigraphs. After brief periods in San Diego, where Caryl restored a Victorian house, the couple returned to Bishop for Wood's final years. He continued painting until shortly before his death on March 14, 1979, just ten days after his 90th birthday and weeks before a major retrospective exhibition at Morseburg Galleries in Los Angeles. Wood's nearly seventy-year career produced thousands of paintings, making him one of America's most prolific landscape painters and certainly its most widely reproduced artist through prints that brought American landscape art to millions of homes.