HUBERT ROBERT (1733-1808)

STUDIES AFTER THE ANTIQUE, INCLUDING A PROCESSION OF VESTALS, TWO VASES AND THE SKULL OF THE COW ISIS, INSCRIBED WITH HIEROGLYPHICS; AND SEVEN WOMEN, AN OENOCHOE, A TROPHY OF ARMS AND VASES
Black chalk on laid paper, watermarked with the Orfini arms with twin L under Fl
27.3 x 20 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Anonymous sale, Christie's, New York, 11.01.1994, lot 311;
Private collection, Paris
 
 
 
 
Robert’s sheets containing studies after the antique such as these generally date from the first half of Robert's career, particularly his years in Rome (with several of the various objects depicted in the present pair of sheets likely drawn from life in the city), during which period Piranesi published his ‘Antichità di Cora’ in 1764 and the ‘Diverses maniere d’adornare i cammini’ in 1769, both of which increased the collecting classes’ hunger for all manner of antiquarian decoration. Robert’s client and patron the Abbé de Saint-Non also engraved sheets of reliefs, vases, and various fragments in his ‘Griffonis’ (1763). 
 
There are a small number of similar sheets that almost certainly came from the same study-book as the present examples which have appeared at auction in the past fifty years: all of these sheets are of the same dimensions, with a strictly regimented arrangement of each object and always in black chalk only. Examples include two further pairs of sheets sold in the same sale as ours at Christie's in 1994 (Lots 312 and 314). 
 
 
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 of inspiration. 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 his body of work from the Roman years 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.