Robert

It is a gust of wind on the vast Saint Peter’s Square in Rome that Hubert Robert sought to capture in this sketch: the water spills over from the fountain while the jets are pushed to the left, like the grey coat of the figure in the red bonnet who walks away from us. The clouds massing on the right while the sun still bathes the square indeed testify to the small atmospheric depression coming in.

Hubert Robert was in Rome from 1754 to 1765 under the protection of the Count of Stainville, the future Duke of Choiseul, who through his generous patronage enabled him to study antiquities and to benefit from the city’s extraordinarily intense cultural life. It was there that Robert met Jean Honoré Fragonard, attended perspective lessons with Francesco Panini and moved within the circle of the engraver Piranesi. He studied ancient monuments and drew abundantly the Italian landscapes, from swift notational sketches to more elaborate, expansive vistas. Thanks to Stainville’s support, he was housed from 1759 at the French Academy in Rome, then installed in the Palazzo Mancini. The following year, he visited Campania and Naples with the Abbé de Saint-Non. Upon his return to Paris, he was received at the Academy in July 1766 as a “painter of ruins” and exhibited at the Salon the views and capriccios which made him a celebrated and sought-after artist.

If oil studies on paper are rare in the work of the great painter of ruins, the sketched studies on the other hand are numerous and all present common traits: silhouettes are summarily traced, architectures handled in broad brushed planes; the underlying drawing is at places perceptible and the brush contours are visible, positioning the works halfway between drawing and painting, at the heart of a process of capturing light, space and atmosphere. Robert however does not forget the small picturesque details which lend charm to his compositions: the seated pilgrim motif, recurrent in his work, seems here asleep, slightly leaning, protected by his large soft hat. In the middle distance, another pilgrim contemplates the expanse of the square, his bundle and his staff under his arms, in a naturally swayed movement. An oil sketch preserved in the Petit Palais in Paris offers good points of comparison, Sculptor Working on the Statue of a Saint in Saint Peter’s in Rome. There too, the painter is struck by the monumentality of the architecture and his rendering of verticality is more spontaneous and expressive than mathematically precise; the figures are sketched in this same liquid manner. The pilgrim is present, from behind, turned toward the confessional. This work and ours are probably very close in date.

As in Study of the Grotto of Pausilippe (Petit Palais) and the Ruins of the Palace of the Emperors (Besançon, Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology), space is treated in a oneiric, almost fantastic manner, detached from perspective and the physical reality of things, in order to give primordial place to the sensations of space, light and air. The circulation of light in the architecture of the columns of the St Peter’s peristyle is rendered through the rhythmic succession between shadow and light, handled with a very light brush and which one finds again on the Vatican hill in the background. The minuteness of the figures across the square heightens the sensation of vast space and elemental forces, all within a calm and tranquil atmosphere.