HUBERT ROBERT (1733-1808)

FIGURES IN THE GROUNDS OF A VILLA, POSSIBLY THE VILLA MEDICI (a)
Black pencil & brown wash
18 x 23 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Folio 26 of the album of 101 drawings made in Italy by Hubert Robert;
(Likely) Sold as part of the artist's studio sale, Paris, 05.04.1809;
The Countess of Béhague (1870-1939) [this work folio 8];
Thence by descent in the family of Ganay;
The Estate of the Marquis de Ganay, Sotheby's, Monaco, 01.12.1989, lot 8 (ill. p.41) [sold post-sale];
Private collection France
 
EXHIBITED (the album):
Paris, Galerie Caileux, 1957, Hubert Robert - Louis Moreau: Exposition du Cent-Cinquantenaire De Leur Mort, cat. no. 1;
Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1987, Hubert Robert: Drawings & Watercolours, cat. no. 12
 
LITERATURE (the album):
R.O. Parks, Piranesi, exhib.cat., Northampton, Mass., Smith College Museum of Art, 1961, p. 74;
J. Scott, Piranesi, London (1975), p. 175 and p. 311, note 9;
V. Carlson, Hubert Robert: Drawings & Watercolours (exhib. cat.), Washington (1987) cat. no. 12 (the album, this sheet ill. p.75)
J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les Jardins, Paris (1987), p.26
 
 
 
 
This sheet comes from one of the few extant Roman sketchbooks of Robert's, in this instance an album that was kept complete until as recently as 1989, and which almost certainly featured in the artist's studio sale of 1809. Drawings from the same album can now be found in collections worldwide, including the Louvre, the Getty Museum, the Morgan Library, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is thought that this particular sketchbook was used during Robert's final years in Rome, as two drawings from it are dated, one 1764 and one 1765. There were over fifty sketchbooks listed in the Robert sale in 1809, with this one called the 'De Ganay' folio, after its previous owners. 
 
 
For an artist who is so inextricably associated with Rome, it perhaps comes as a surprise to discover that Robert spent just eleven years in the city; however, during that period, he was to compile enough drawings of what he saw and imagined, and sometimes a combination of the two, to last him a lifetime. Hubert Robert arrived in Rome at the end of November 1754 to study at the French academy, where he was to be a pensionnaire. This time as a student came to an end in October 1762, but Robert's commissions and support from his friends enabled him to remain in Rome for a further three years. Whilst studying and working in Rome, Robert came to befriend his contemporary Charles-Joseph Natoire, alongside whom he would often work and with whom he occasionally collaborated, as well as the older Italian artists Gian Paolo Panini and Giovanni Battista Piranesi, with all three providing much in the way of inspiration and influence on the budding artist. 
 
The decade or so he spent in Rome was to be one of the most important times of Robert's life, and his prolific output of drawings attests to his eagerness to absorb as much as he could, to hone what would become a more consistent and established style of his own, and to let his imagination run free in pen, ink, wash and chalk. Much of Robert's body of work from this period no longer survives, and so those sheets that do are both valuable resources for understanding the young Robert as much as they are important historical artefacts and records. 
 
 
In a formal analysis of Robert's Roman-period pen & ink drawings, Victor Carlson gave a broad overview of this particular part of the Robert corpus, and could almost have been looking at our sheet as he wrote:
 
"At the outset, it is important to recognize that Robert's Roman pen-and-wash drawings vary widely in style, depending on his goal in creating an image...Students of eighteenth-century French drawings are most likely to be familiar with Robert's rapidly drawn pen sketches, in which he boldly noted down whatever sights or ideas caught his attention Generally these notations are on pages from albums or sketchbooks that have been disassembled [e.g. the present work]...Nowhere else is the influence of Piranesi's draftsmanship on Robert as evident as in album pages such as these; hastily jotted pen lines over a few broad slashes of wash can evoke a sunlit corner of Rome or an architectural capriccio." [1]