Robert

A new discovery of a large red chalk drawing shows how important the creation of variations was to Hubert Robert. Known for being prolific, Robert made drawings and paintings throughout his career, especially views of ruins populated by washerwomen – a theme that brought him immediate success. In Italy, where he lived from 1754 to 1765, Robert mainly produced red chalk drawings illustrating sites in Rome, Latium and Campania. These views were created in the context of his training at the French Academy in Rome and were intended to enrich the portfolios of a few French collectors such as Mariette, the Abbé de Saint-Non and Bailli de Breteuil. Robert preserved reversed images of these works by taking care to make counterproofs and brought back dozens of compositions with him to France in 1765. He used these to create variations in painting and drawing. Such self-citation increased Robert’s productivity significantly, but also proved an exercise in self-criticism that has been the subject of little commentary¹. Rare and misunderstood until the discovery of this drawing, the red chalk sheets corrected by Robert over several years were also used to make variants. They now form a corpus that is essential to our understanding of this prolific artist’s working methods.

In Rome, where he lived in the Palazzo Mancini, seat of the French Academy – thanks to the patronage of the future Duc de Choiseul – Robert worked ardently, drawing capricci with pen and ink in the manner of the capriccio painter Giovanni Paolo Panini. Three years later, around 1758, Robert began to make drawings in red chalk and this remained his favourite technique for the rest of his career. Amongst others, he worked in the company of Jean-Honoré Fragonard, at the time a pensionnaire at the French Academy in Rome². Two red chalk drawings that the two men made together in the ruins of the Coliseum³ are a reminder of their activity. The Besançon sheet⁴ shows Robert’s confident, rapid handling of light and his construction of the composition using architectural elements to define various planes along crossing diagonals. This same process, that brings great dynamism to his compositions, is evident in our drawing. Here, the horizontal format allowed Robert to move the point of view further into the distance and to concentrate on animating the scene, using vegetation to frame it. Robert’s vigorous handling is present again in the construction of volumes with short vertical and horizontal hatching lines – sometimes crossed – and in the depiction of short tufts of foliage. Robert also depicted tree trunks and basins that emphasize the compositional dynamics in both drawings. This manner is typical of Robert’s style in the year 1758 and dates the drawing to his Italian period, reinforced by the paper’s watermark that identifies it as made in Rome. Although Robert was happy with the Besançon sheet, he reworked our sheet a few years later.

Around 1758, Robert drew a well surrounded by ruins in red chalk, around which two figures bustle. A few years later, probably around 1764, he reworked this composition entirely with pen and brown ink. Robert’s main preoccupation was to animate the scene, made apparent by six new figures turned towards the well. The two pre-existing figures were completely reworked and accompanied by a man seen from the back leaning over a slab; a group of figures including an infant near a figure drawing water appeared while on the left side of the sheet, a woman and her child watch them. Robert suggested a few alternatives such as transforming the slabs into an ancient sarcophagi decorated with strigils, as seen on the Besançon frontispiece, and an illegible inscription placed in the centre. He emphasized the edges of rocks and changed the angle of incline on the two tree trunks to the left. This detail shows the importance for Robert of harmonizing the composition with the subject. Having concentrated the viewer’s attention on the well, Robert framed it delicately with rounded branches, their density reinforced by brown ink lines. Finally, gouache is added to emphasize the contrast of light and shadow.

Between the creation and the reworking in red chalk by Robert, Jean-Robert Ango⁵ made a copy of the drawing by using a pantograph. The red chalk work and the counter-proof (held in the Louvre museum⁶) show the close links between Academy residents and French artists active in Rome. Robert and Fragonard lent many drawings to Ango to make copies. His technique is easily identifiable by thick, doubled lines. For our sheet, Ango employed a pantograph that allowed him to remain perfectly faithful to Robert’s composition, but change the proportions. Archival sources are silent on origins of this collaboration, but one can hypothesize on the theory of an apprenticeship due to the early date of Robert’s work, before it was considered for commercial use a few years’ later when Ango progressed.

Other red chalk drawings made around 1758-1760 were corrected by Robert with pen and brown ink, such as a sheet (now in Orleans) that illustrates a cellar⁷ and one in Besançon that depicts the interior view of an Italian palazzo.⁸ A third drawing – a frontispiece design for a collection of drawn views of Campania, dated 1760⁹ – shows later corrections in gouache. With its horizontal format, composition built up on diagonals and the theme of washerwomen collecting water near ruins in a landscape, this drawing shares many characteristics with ours. This group confirms that Robert frequently made corrections and variations on reworked counterproofs, a practice well known within his œuvre.¹⁰ Reworking a counterproof destined for the art market gained precious time while proposing a variation on the original composition. It is an eminently self-critical way of working, as evidenced by our drawing: the corrections made here fit in the context of the series of engravings Soirées de Rome. In 1764, Robert made six etchings in honour of Marguerite Le Comte who had embarked upon a Grand Tour with Claude-Henri Watelet.¹¹ Robert may have corrected the red chalk sheet in his studio to create the composition of the seventh plate, The Well ¹². In fact, here the corrected elements are all present: the same well masonry and a sarcophagus with strigils used as a barrier, preceded by a large slab and a square tub. Robert kept hundreds of drawings preciously in his studio and after his return to Paris in 1765, he created variations based on earlier compositions constantly. In 1776, he signed a variation of our corrected red chalk drawing, which had been made by repeating the motif of the washerwoman seen from the back in the print. A second version of this red chalk drawing exists, as well as a counterproof held in Besançon¹³ that Robert used later for a painted overdoor.

Sarah Catala (March 222, Literature added in March 2024)