Hubert Robert
(1733 – Paris – 1808)
View through the Colonnade onto St. Peter's Square, Rome, c. 1758
Red chalk
52.7 x 40.5 cm
PROVENANCE
François Renaud (end of 18th/beginning 19th Century), Paris, Collector's Stamp (L. 1042), lower right on the drawing and on the mount
Private collection, Rhineland, since 1925
The youthful Hubert Robert travelled with the Marquis de Stainville to Rome, where he quickly became intrigued with ancient Roman and Baroque monuments. Stainville, official ambassador of Louis XV in Rome enabled Robert in 1759 to become stipendiary at the Académie de France in the Villa Medici. Our drawing, dated to 1758 by Sarah Catala, is unsigned like the majority of his drawings before acceding to his scholarship at the Académie. The drawings of the Rome period have always been highly prized and demonstrate Robert's mastery of the sanguine technique. It can be compared with a sheet in the Horvitz collection, Boston (D-F 745) representing the colonnade in the Villa Giulia. The staffage figures are similarly rendered in quick and sure strokes and both sheets share the same large format. The with "Roberti" inscribed "Portico of St. Peter's" (Paris, Musée Louvre, départment des arts graphiques, R.F. 31266) is another impressive example of Robert's fascination with the Vatican. Our drawing displays an artistic mastery of the third dimension. With brilliant perspective he brings together the various spaces, volumes and voids into a dynamic composition. Even the obelisk in St. Peter's Square is palpably present. The battered stall door in the foreground is contrasted with the grandeur of Bernini's Colonnade and the obelisk. Toward the end of the formative 1750s decade in Rome, Robert turned from architectural capricci to a campaign interpreting the great Roman monuments.
Our drawing bears two dry stamps of Francois Renaud (Lugt 1042), a dealer and mountmaker (monteur en dessin) in Paris at the end of the 18th century. He intended to document both his professions with the two stamps. The finest Robert drawings in the collection the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Valence bear the Renaud stamp. One finds his stamp on Robert drawings in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Besancon, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
David Mandrella, Paris, 2021
We kindly thank Sarah Catala for confirmation of the attribution and dating of this drawing.