Beschreibung:

Details
HUBERT ROBERT (PARIS 1733-1808)
Galerie en ruines avec un couple à cheval au centre
signé, localisé et daté ‘ROBERTI/ ...LINAVIT ROMAE/ 1760’ (sur la pierre au centre à gauche)
graphite, plume et encre noire, aquarelle, trois bandes de papier ajoutées le long des bords droit, gauche et supérieur
50,7 x 66,3 cm (19 7/8 x 26 1/8 in.)
Provenance
Georges Bourgarel (1857-1922) ; sa vente, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 15-16 juin 1922, lot 199.
Vente Palais d’Orsay, Paris, 7 décembre 1979, lot 6.
Vente Sotheby’s, Monaco, 5 décembre 1991, lot 13.
Literature
H. Burda, Die ruine in den bildern Hubert Roberts, Munich, 1967, p. 51, ill.
A. Ananoff, François Boucher Lausanne-Paris, 1976, I., p. 190, n° 53/3, p. 189, fig. 271.
V. Carlson, Hubert Robert Drawings & Watercolours, cat. exp., Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1978, pp. 22, 26, note 68.
François Boucher, cat. exp., New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Detroit, The Detroit Institute of Arts, Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 1986-1987, p. 126, sous le n° 12.
M. Roland Michel, Maurice et Pauline Feuillet de Borsat collectionneurs. Dessins français et étrangers du XVIIe au XIXe siècle, cat. exp., Marseille, musée des beaux-arts, 2001, sous le n° 112.
Special notice
This lot is offered without reserve.
Post lot text
HUBERT ROBERT, AN ARCHITECTURAL CAPRICCIO WITH RUINS AND A COUPLE ON HORSEBACK, BLACK CHALK, WATERCOLOUR
The nickname ‘Robert des ruines’ (Robert of the ruins), given to the artist by Czarina Catherine II and later taken up by Denis Diderot in his reviews of the Paris Salons, perfectly suits the present watercolour where the architectural elements are covered with foliage and weeds that have grown between the stones over time.
In Hubert Robert’s drawings, watercolours or grisailles slightly enhanced with blue, like in the present sheet, are rarer than drawings in red chalks. Examples other than the present work include an Architectural capriccio with the Pantheon dated 1760 in the collection of Jean Bonna, Geneva (N. Strasser, Dessins français du XVI et XVIIIe siècle. Collection Jean Bonna, Geneva, 2016, no. 79, ill.), or an Architectural capriccio with the Laocoon at the Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, inv. 1978.35 (Hubert Robert (1733-1808). Un Peintre visionnaire, exhib. cat., Paris, Musée du Louvre, and Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2016, no. 63, ill.).
Dated 1760, the drawing was produced during Hubert Robert’s stay at the Académie de France in Rome, a period when the director of the institution, Charles-Joseph Natoire sent a letter to the Marquis de Marigny praising the progress of the young student who was ‘working at his ordinary job with zeal and success’ (letter dated 20 February 1760, published in C. Voiriot, ‘Chronologie biographique’, in exhib. cat., 2016, op. cit., p. 448). A year later, Natoire mentions sending to Pierre-Jean Mariette ‘some coloured drawings’ (ibid., p. 449). Robert was still nourished by the works of his Roman masters who specialised in the representation of antique ruins, Giovanni Paolo Pannini (1691-1765), Charles-Louis Clérisseau (1721-1820) or Giovanni Battiste Piranesi (1720-1778) (G. Faroult ibid., p. 239).
The subject of the ruined arch of a large gallery is one of the many topoi in the artist’s work, perfectly rendered in The Old Temple, a painting depicting a long gallery flanked on either side by columns and whose coffered vault is in open ruins (Art Institute of Chicago, inv. 1900.382; see ibid., p. 96, fig. 39). Another recurring element in Hubert Robert’s work is the hanging lantern found in The Fountain, a painting in the Musée Cognacq Jay in Paris (inv. COGJ98; see ibid., p. 252, fig. 98), in one of the six monumental Architectural Capricci of more than two meters in height preserved in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris (inv. 19730; see ibid., 2016, no. 102, ill.), and again in the painting The Return of the Cattle, exhibited at the Salon in 1775, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, inv. 35.40.1.
The art of quotation does not end there because the couple on horseback in the center of the composition is found in a painting by François Boucher The Return From the Market, which belonged to Jacques-Laure Le Tonnelier de Breteuil (1723-1785), better known as Bailli de Breteuil, and who was Hubert Robert’s patron in Rome (Springfield Art Museum, inv. 55.01; see A. Ananoff, François Boucher Lausanne and Paris, 1976, I, no. 53, ill.). François Boucher’s couple was engraved by Alexandre Briceau under the title The Travellers, after a red chalk drawing (ibid., nos. 53/1, 53/2). A painting of the same composition, signed lower left, was sold at the Palais Galliera in Paris on 26 November 1975, lot G.
A decade after the present watercolour was made, Hubert Robert used this composition again, quoting the central couple and the ruins on the left in a circular oil on canvas dated 1777, formerly in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and auctioned at Christie’s, New York, June 6, 2012, part of lot 81 (fig. 1). In addition, a watercolour that more closely replicates the present drawing with the colonnades on either side of a gap to the outside, the hanging lantern, and the figures in the foreground but smaller in size (39 x 49 cm), from the collection of Maurice and Pauline Feuillet de Borsat, is in the Musée Borély, Marseille (inv. 68-184).
The subtlety in the choice of shades slightly heightened with blue in the sky, the architectural research of this caprice mixing different periods, from antiquity to the eighteenth century, through the Renaissance, and the addition of small figures in the foreground that animate the composition, make this large sheet not a simple preparatory study, but a work of art in itself.
We are grateful to Sarah Catala for confirming the attribution after visual examination.
Fig. 1. Hubert Robert The Ruins. Private collection.