Hubert Robert
Born Paris, 22 May 1733; Died Paris, 15 April 1808.
French painter, draughtsman, etcher and landscape designer. He was one of the most prolific and engaging landscape painters in 18th-century France. He specialized in architectural scenes in which topographical elements derived from the buildings and monuments of ancient and modern Italy and of France are combined in often fantastic settings or fictitious juxtapositions. The fluid touch and rich impasto employed in his paintings, also shared by his friend Jean-Honoré Fragonard, are matched by the freedom of his numerous red chalk drawings and the few etchings that he is known to have produced.
1. Training and early years in Paris and Rome, to 1765.
Robert’s father was an official in the service of the Marquis de Stainville whose son, the Comte de Stainville (later Duc de Choiseul), became the young artist’s protector. According to Mariette, Robert learnt drawing as a pupil of the sculptor René-Michel (Michel-Ange) Slodtz, although other sources suggest, improbably, that he studied with the painter Pierre-Jacques Cazes. It is certain, however, that he received a classical education in Paris, at either the aristocratic Collège de Navarre or the Collège de Beauvais.
In 1754 Robert arrived in Rome in the entourage of the Comte de Stainville, who had been appointed French Ambassador to the Holy See. Robert was to spend the next 11 years in Italy. Although he had not studied at the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris, Stainville arranged his acceptance at the Académie de France in Rome, the Director of which was then Charles-Joseph Natoire. Stainville financed his upkeep for three years, until he was awarded an official place as a pensionnaire in 1759, due to the intervention of Mme de Pompadour’s brother, Abel-François Poisson, Marquis de Marigny, the new Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi. Robert’s protector had become Duc de Choiseul in 1756 and Foreign Minister of France two years later; personal influence at the highest levels thus worked in favour of the young painter who, as Natoire wrote on his arrival in Rome, had ‘a taste for architecture’. This taste already defined one of the most striking aspects of his art, which consists principally of architecture, often ruined, in landscape settings. It was while in Rome that Robert began his life-long fascination with ruined buildings, both real and invented: in one of a series of 91 red chalk drawings (Valence, Mus. B.-A. & Hist. Nat.) executed at about this time he depicted himself drawing the Borghese Vase with a plaque reading Roma quanta fuit ipsae ruinae docent (Rome’s very ruins tell of her former greatness).
Among Robert’s acquaintances in Rome were the Abbé de Saint-Non, with whom he travelled to Naples (on a drawing expedition) in 1760, and the collectors Claude-Henri Watelet, Aleksandr, Count Stroganov and, above all, Jacques le Tonnelier, Bailli de Breteuil, with whom Robert used to recite Virgil in Latin. Robert also met Fragonard in Rome, and he and Saint-Non drew with him in the gardens of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli (e.g. red chalk drawings, Paris, Louvre). Other artists in Rome included the view painter Giovanni Paolo Panini, who was professor of perspective at the Académie de France and from whom Choiseul commissioned a series of Views of Ancient and Modern Rome (New York, Met.), on which it has been suggested Robert collaborated, and of which he owned replicas. Giovanni Battista Piranesi began at this time to publish his great collections of engravings of Roman views, and these and the paintings of Panini influenced Robert’s artistic vision (see also Capriccio).
2. Paris, 1765 and after.
Robert left Rome for Paris in July 1765, taking with him the drawings of Italian buildings and landscapes that were a source for his paintings for many years after (e.g. the Discovery of the Laokoon, 1773; Richmond, VA, Mus. F.A.; see [not available online]). A year later he had the rare privilege of being made an associate and a full member of the Académie Royale at the same session on 26 July 1766. His morceau de réception was a painting of the Port of Ripetta, Rome (Paris, Ecole N. Sup. B.-A.), of which the first version (Vaduz, Samml. Liechtenstein) had been executed in 1761 for Choiseul, together with its pendant A Port Embellished with Architecture (Dunkirk, Mus. B.-A.).
Henceforth Robert exhibited regularly at the Salon from 1767 to 1798. At his first Salon Robert exhibited a number of works in which the principal elements of his subject-matter and style could be seen: there were thirteen easel paintings—four views of ruins, three of real or imaginary architecture, four landscapes, two ‘picturesque’ subjects—as well as a large decorative canvas of an Italianate landscape. Almost the whole of Robert’s considerable oeuvre could be classified under these headings, which reveal a range of inspiration much more varied than he is usually given credit for. In addition to such scenes of Italian derivation, Robert also showed an interest in the topography of France, in particular of Paris and the Ile de France, as sources for subjects.
The element of fantasy characteristic of so much of Robert’s work is least present in his views of Paris. In 1772, for instance, he painted the Burning of the Hôtel-Dieu and the Ruins of the Hôtel-Dieu (Paris, Carnavalet), taking up a theme that he had painted in an imaginary vein in 1764 in a depiction of the burning of the monuments of Rome (Frankfurt am Main, Städel. Kstinst.). In 1781, when the Paris Opéra burnt down, he painted the fire (Paris, Carnavalet). Modern as well as ancient ruins attracted him, as in the Demolition of the Houses on the Pont au Change, Paris (1788; Munich, Alte Pin.) and in his paintings of the Bastille in 1789 (Paris, Carnavalet). His interest in French subjects led him in the late 1780s to accept a commission to paint the Roman remains of Languedoc, including the Maison Carré, Nîmes and the Pont du Gard (both 1787; Paris, Louvre).
The imaginative quality of Robert’s landscape paintings brought him in 1778 an appointment as Dessinateur des Jardins du Roi, thanks to the support of the new Directeur des Bâtiments du Roi, Charles de Flahaut de la Billarderie, Comte d’Angiviller. The previous year he had presented at the Salon two views of the Park at Versailles (versions, Versailles, Château, and Lisbon, Mus. Gulbenkian). He installed François Girardon’s famous 17th-century marble group of Apollo Tended by the Nymphs in a new setting of an artificial grotto executed to his designs at Versailles; also for Louis XVI he designed new gardens ‘à l’anglaise’ at the château of Rambouillet, drew up plans for the dairy there and even designed its furnishings. He was also responsible for the design of the picturesque gardens and dairy (destr.) at Méréville, near Paris, for the Marquis de La Borde de Méréville. Robert directed the works at Méréville after having presented his ideas in a number of paintings (e.g. Sceaux, Château, Mus. Ile de France; Stockholm, Nmus.).
In 1788 Robert decorated the dining room of the château at Méréville with four large paintings (Chicago, IL, A. Inst.); the previous year the four canvases of the Roman remains of Languedoc (Paris, Louvre) were completed for Louis XVI as decorations for the château of Fontainebleau. Such decorative ensembles, created for royal patrons and wealthy private clients, formed an important part of his output, and were among the best of their kind painted in the last third of the 18th century. Noteworthy examples include those at Bagatelle, near Paris, executed in 1778 for the Comte d’Artois, later Charles X, those in the château of Haroué, near Nancy, executed for the Prince of Craon-Beauvau, and those in the Hôtel de Noailles, Rambouillet. Among other such sets of paintings, but whose origins are obscure, is the series in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In 1778 Robert, who from 1771 had had royal lodgings in the Arsenal, Paris, was awarded lodgings in the Louvre, where he lived until 1802. In 1784 he was appointed Garde des Tableaux for the Musée Royal that was to be installed there. From this period of his life date not only some of his finest Italian landscapes, including the Portico of Marcus Aurelius, Rome and its pendant the Portico of Octavius, Rome (both 1787; Paris, Louvre, on dep. London, French Embassy), but also a remarkable series of oil-sketches (Paris, Louvre), continued through the 1790s, presenting his schemes for the replanning of the Grande Galerie of the Musée du Louvre for the purposes of the museum. In some of these the element of fantasy is allowed to dominate over practical concerns, as when Robert presented the building in ruins . He continued in his post during the first years of the French Revolution (1789–95), even painting a Revolutionary subject, the Fête de la Fédération (1790; Versailles, Château), until he was imprisoned in Paris in 1793–4, first in Sainte-Pélagie and later in Saint-Lazare. While in prison he continued to paint and draw, completing some large canvases.
Outside France, Robert had considerable success in Russia, where Count Stroganov had become Chamberlain to Catherine II and President of the St Petersburg Academy of Fine Art. It was presumably due to him that Robert gained Russian patrons, beginning with the Empress, as well as her son, Grand Duke Paul, for whom he executed some large decorative paintings, still in situ, in his palace at Pavlovsk. Robert executed other works that are still in situ at Arkhangel’skoye, commissioned by the Yusupov family. Such was his success in Russia that the Hermitage, St Petersburg, now has the richest collection in the world of his work.
Immensely popular in his lifetime, Robert was sometimes criticized in his later career for carelessness and over-production: Denis Diderot, who greeted his early work at the Salons with enthusiasm, later accused him of becoming facile and negligent in his compositions, particularly his figures, which he often derived from the works of François Boucher. In her Souvenirs (Paris, 1835–7) his friend Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun recorded that this productive artist died ‘brush in hand’ as he prepared to go out to dinner.
Jean de Cayeux. "Robert, Hubert." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T072362 (accessed March 7, 2012).
