Hubert Robert

Anonymous sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 4 May 1921, lot 24 (with its pendants lots 23, 25 and 26);

Collection M. T. P. Thorne;

His sale, Galerie Georges Petit, Paris, 22-23 May 1922, lot 23 (with its pendants lots 22, 24 and 25);

Acquired by M. Kremer;

Sale "Docteur X", Galerie Charpentier, Paris, 28 March 1955, lot 78 (with its pendant lot 79);

Anonymous sale, Il Ponte, Milan, 28 March 2023, lot 155.

Originally painted as a overdoor, this delightful painting offers a nostalgic, idyllic vision of a lost pastoral world, where washerwomen work cheerfully amidst omnipresent nature and ruins.

The painting of Washerwomen at the lavoir, which has long remained largely unseen, bears witness to Hubert Robert’s ability to find constant new approaches, despite his enormous output, while staying faithful to the same pictorial register. The work illustrates one of the painter’s preferred practices, made essential by the many decorative commissions he received: endlessly varying motifs, from painting to painting, re-using, reformulating and transforming them, so that his oeuvre becomes one immense variation on the same few themes.

This painting, when it first appeared on the art market in a Paris sale in 1921, was accompanied by three others of the same size, thus forming an ensemble of four overdoors, now dismantled, whose origin is unknown. The three other works, which today are known only from reproductions in sale catalogues of 1921 and 1922 (ill. 1, 2 and 3), shared the present painting’s theme: washerwomen at work in picturesque landscapes, each one different from the others. The first shows an antique fountain surmounted by two lions; the second is viewed from underneath the arch of a stone bridge; and the third depicts young women on the bank of a river spanned by a rustic wooden footbridge.

On these four overdoors, the artist revisits the theme of women at work and water that he had already explored earlier, in four large-scale works for the Salle des États in the Archbishop’s Palace in Rouen, made in 1774–1775. He tackled this subject again, during this same period, in the large painting in the billiard room of the Château de La Chapelle-Godefroy; this painting seems to have provided Robert with some elements which are reproduced almost exactly in the four overdoors discussed here.

The present painting, which stands perfectly well on its own merits without its former companions, presents the viewer with an arcadian scene of an idyllic and imaginary country life, far from the worries of modern reality. 

Madame Sarah Catala has confirmed the authenticity of this work, after first-hand inspection.

Ill. 1 Hubert Robert, La Fontaine (unknown present location).

Ill. 2 Hubert Robert, La Voûte de pierre (unknown present location).

Ill. 3 Hubert Robert, La Passerelle (unknown present location).