Hubert Robert

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Hubert Robert
Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun
Born22 May 1733
Paris, France
Died15 April 1808(1808-04-15) (aged 74)
Paris, France

Hubert Robert (French pronunciation: [ybɛʁ ʁɔbɛʁ]; 22 May 1733 – 15 April 1808) was a French painter in the school of Romanticism, noted especially for his landscape paintings and capricci, or semi-fictitious picturesque depictions of ruins in Italy and of France.[1]

Biography

Early years

Hubert Robert was born in Paris in 1733. His father, Nicolas Robert, was in the service of

Étienne-François de Choiseul
, son of his father's employer, who had been named French ambassador and would become a Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Louis XV in 1758.

In Rome

Städelsches Kunstinstitut

He spent fully eleven years in Rome, a remarkable length of time; after the young artist's official residence at the

Natoire, director of the French Academy, who urged the pensionnaires to sketch out-of-doors, from nature: Robert needed no urging; drawings from his sketchbooks document his travels: Villa d'Este, Caprarola
.

The contrast between the ruins of

capricci of romantically overgrown ruins influenced him so greatly that he gained the nickname Robert des ruines.[3] The albums of sketches and drawings he assembled in Rome supplied him with motifs that he worked into paintings throughout his career.[4]

He is reported to have carved his name into the walls of the Colosseum in 1767.[5]

In Paris

The Artist in His Cell (1793), ink, wash, watercolor, and chalk, 22.7 x 32.7 cm., Musée Carnavalet

His success on his return to Paris in 1765 was rapid: the following year he was received by the

Salon of 1767, consisting of thirteen paintings and a number of drawings, prompted Denis Diderot to write: "The ideas which the ruins awake in me are grand." Robert subsequently showed work at every Salon until 1802.[7] He was successively appointed "Designer of the King's Gardens", "Keeper of the King's Pictures" and "Keeper of the Museum and Councilor to the Academy".[8]

Robert was arrested in October 1793, during the

Robespierre.[10] Robert narrowly escaped the guillotine when through error another prisoner with a similar name was guillotined in his place.[11]

Subsequently, he was placed on the committee of five in charge of the new national museum at the

Palais du Louvre
.

The Revolution also resulted in the destruction of some of Robert's work; his painting Péché Cardinal (ca.1799) is one that is thought to be lost or destroyed in a fire.[

watercolour of Robert's design is in the National Archives in Paris.[12]

Robert died of a stroke on 15 April 1808.

Style and legacy

A Hermit Praying in the Ruins of a Roman Temple

The quantity of his work is immense, comprising perhaps one thousand paintings and ten thousand drawings.[7] The Louvre alone contains nine paintings by his hand and specimens are frequently to be met with in provincial museums and private collections. Robert's work has more or less of that scenic character which justified his selection by Voltaire to paint the decorations of his theatre at Ferney.[2]

His work was much engraved by the abbé de Saint-Non, with whom he had visited Naples in the company of Fragonard during his early days; in Italy his work has also been frequently reproduced by Chatelain, Linard, Le Veau, and others.[2]

He is noted for the liveliness and point with which he treated the subjects he painted. Equally at ease painting small easel pictures or huge decorations, he worked quickly using an

alla prima technique.[13] Along with this incessant activity as an artist, his daring character and many adventures attracted general admiration and sympathy. In the fourth canto of his L'Imagination Jacques Delille celebrated Robert's miraculous escape when lost in the catacombs.[2]

Robert and picturesque gardens

Cypresses (1773), 300 x 75 cm., Hermitage
Triumphal Column (1773), 300 x 74 cm., Hermitage

Enterprising and prolific, Robert also acted in a role similar to that of a modern-day art director, conceptualizing fashionably dilapidated gardens for several aristocratic clients, summarized by his possible intervention at Ermenonville; there he would have been working with the architect Jean-Marie Morel for the marquis de Girardin, who was the author of Compositions des paysages (1777) and had distinct views of his own. In 1786 he began his better documented[14] collaboration at Méréville, with his most significant patron, the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde, who found François-Joseph Bélanger's plans too expensive and perhaps too formal.

Though documents are again lacking, Hubert Robert's name is invariably invoked in connection with

petit hameau. Robert's contribution to garden design was not in making practical ground plans for improvements but in providing atmospheric inspiration for the proposed effect.[15] At Ermenonville and at Méréville "Hubert Robert's paintings both recorded and inspired", according to W.H. Adams:[16] Robert's four large ruin fantasies, painted in 1787 for Méréville[17] may be searched in vain for direct connections with the garden. Hubert's paintings of the Moulin Joly of his friend Claude-Henri Watelet render the fully-grown atmosphere of a garden that had been under way since 1754. His set of six Italianate landscape panels painted for Bagatelle[18] were not the inspiration for the formal turfed parterre set in the thinned woodlands, designed by Bélanger; the later picturesque extensions of Bagatelle were carried out by its Scottish gardener, William Blaikie.[19] Robert's commissioned painting of the long-delayed rejuvenation of the park at Versailles, begun in 1774 with the cutting down of the trees for sale as firewood, is a record of the event, resonant with allegorical meaning.[20] Robert was more certainly responsible for the conception of the grotto and cascades of the 'Baths of Apollo,' tucked within a grove of the chateau's park and built to house François Girardon
's celebrated sculpture group Apollo Attended by Nymphs.

Gallery

Works on paper

Oil paintings

References, notes and sources

References and notes
  1. ^ Jean de Cayeux. "Robert, Hubert." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 13 Jan. 2017
  2. ^ a b c d Chisholm 1911.
  3. ^ Robert possessed no fewer than twenty-five of Pannini's canvases. (Jean Cailleux, "Introduction to the Method of Hubert Robert"The Burlington Magazine 109 No. 767, February 1967), p. i.
  4. ^ Sarah Catala, "La matérialité fonctionnelle, Quelques refléxions sur les pratiques de dessin d'Hubert Robert", in exh. cat. Hubert Robert, un peintre visionnaire, Paris, éditions du musée du Louvre / Somogy, p. 65-72.
  5. ^ Salcedo, Andrea (9 July 2023). "A not-so-brief history of the Colosseum for confused vandals". Washington Post.
  6. ^ Le port de Rome, orné de différens Monumens d'Architecture ancien et moderne.
  7. ^ a b c Colin B. Bailey, "Hubert Robert & the Joy of Ruins", The New York Review of Books 63.15 (October 13, 2016), pp. 35–37.
  8. ^ Dessinateur des Jardins du Roi, Garde des tableaux du Roi, and Garde du Museum et conseiller à l'Academie
  9. ^ 18 brumaire An II
  10. ^ He was released 18 thermidor 1794.
  11. ^ Histoire de Paris, Héron de Villefosse, Editions Grasset (Paris), 1955, pg 181
  12. ^ A colour print of a detail of the design is mounted in Huisman, p88.
  13. ^ Hubert Robert Biography, National Gallery of Art https://www.nga.gov/collection/artist-info.1832.html
  14. ^ Victor Carlson, "Hubert Robert in Rome: Some Pen-and-Wash Drawings" Master Drawings 39.3 (Autumn 2001, pp. 288-299) p. 291.
  15. ^ Compare the role of Louis Moreau at Bagatelle.
  16. ^ Adams1979:104
  17. ^ At the Art Institute of Chicago.
  18. ^ At the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
  19. ^ Joseph Baillio, "Hubert Robert's Decorations for the Château de Bagatelle" Metropolitan Museum Journal 27 (1992), pp. 149–182.
  20. ^ Paula Rea Radisich, "The King Prunes His Garden: Hubert Robert's Picture of the Versailles Gardens in 1775" Eighteenth-Century Studies 21.4 (Summer 1988), pp. 454–471.
Sources
The Arc de Triomphe and the Theatre of Orange, 1787 (Louvre), part of the Principal Monuments of France series

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Hubert Robert.
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