Hubert Robert

This grand view of a courtyard within Roman ruins, animated with figures going about their daily activities, is a wonderful example of Hubert Robert’s genius in blending archaic decadence with quotidian informality.

Executed in pen and ink and watercolour with touches of gouache, the scene is set in the ruins of a Roman villa, an architectural fantasy derived from the celebrated monuments the artist studied in Rome, where he lived and worked from 1754 until 1765. As is clear from the substantial inscription and date on the building's keystone, this drawing was made while Robert was actually in Rome, and both the presence of the full signature and the work's substantial scale indicate that it was made as an autonomous work of art, for sale. Judging from the old inscriptions on the backboard, the drawing did indeed find a home in a number of illustrious collections (see Provenance).

Hubert Robert's extensive studies of the ruins of antiquity provided him with ample visual material for both his paintings and his drawings. His inclusion of figures in many of his views not only emphasizes the scale of these grandiose monuments but also serves to animate them with scenes of everyday life.  Like many of his contemporaries, Robert was not necessarily concerned with producing accurate topographical views, often combining various ancient sculptures and monuments into powerful capricci.

The present drawing is dominated by the Roman ruins that surround the courtyard, with sumptuous decorative capitals and a frieze filled with animated figures running across the central section of the building. Above, washing lines are laden with fresh linen, while figures congregate, some peering over the ruined walls, others lowering a basket to the terrace below. Framing the scene at ground level are a family enjoying a lunch al fresco to the left, and two men standing in conversation beside their horses, to the right. In the centre, through the open gated archway, we see another group of figures at a table, engaged in animated conversation. Afternoon sunlight pervades the composition, creating a highly effective patchwork of light and shade across the stones and figures. 

So many of these motifs will be familiar to those who know Robert’s oeuvre, and works such as this demonstrate how apt was his contemporary nickname: 'Robert des Ruines'. Yet although many of his numerous paintings and drawings do follow the same essential formula, Robert's great talent for combining and re-using elements in ways that are constantly new and original mean his works never seem repetitious. A master of his chosen genre of landscape, he was a prolific draughtsman who has left an extensive and highly appealing corpus of drawings.  

Another similarly conceived courtyard scene, Roman Ruins, Villa Pamphilj, executed later in Robert's career, in 1774, but none the less broadly comparable with the present work, is in The Cleveland Museum of Art.¹

See also lot 42 in this sale.

1. Hubert Robert, Drawings and Watercolours, exhib.cat., Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, 1978, p. 104, no. 39