Figures in a Colonnade

Leaning on fragments of fallen columns or overturned entablatures, soldiers and peasants focus their regard on an ancient statue of a seated man. No attributes permit us to identify the sculpture, nor the time or location where the scene takes place. The vagueness was intentional, for Robert's aim was not historical veracity, but rather, to free the imagination of the viewer. His idealized vision of visitors exploring a vast ancient ruin is, conceived broadly, a glorification both of the past civilizations that built such structures and of those who come to learn from them. The theme of the tunnel or gallery is so frequent in Hubert Robert's work that it was the subject of a book published in 1978 by art historian André Corboz, in which he studied Robert’s sources, his innovations, and his symbolism. Corboz illustrated the Met's drawing as an example of Robert's preference for low vanishing points, accentuated by the use of continuous colonnades and architraves, supporting alternating segments of barrel vaults and rib vaults. If Robert's first source of inspiration were the ruins he observed during his stay in Italy from 1754 to 1765, as well as the engravings of the Venetian architect, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), his representation of monumental galleries like the one in the Met’s drawing, also owes a debt to the French visionary architect Etienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799). The influence of the latter, especially on the late creations of Robert, deserves recognition, and can also be seen in another sheet in the collection, Triumphal Arch (1980.1018).


The theme of the Met’s drawing can be compared to several other works in the artist’s œuvre. Their compositions have in common ancient galleries with sharply receding perspective built around slightly off-center vanishing points, statues, figures and antique fragments in the foreground, and a somber tonality offset by a distant light-filled doorway. We can mention a watercolor made around 1775-1780 that shows an imaginary gallery with the statue of Menander (Karlsruhe, Staatliche Kunsthalle, acc. no. 1979.19), a red chalk drawing, in a private collection, dated 1779 (exh. cat., New York, Slatkin gallery, 1959, French master drawings XVI-XX centuries, no. 57) and its reversed version made in watercolor, Ruined colonnade, dated 1780 (Lille, musée des beaux-arts, Acc. No. Pl). The particularly large format of the Lille drawing (80 x 70 cm), corresponds to the dimensions Robert chose for the series of nine watercolors of ancient Roman monuments that he exhibited at the Salon of 1781 (Paris, Musée du Louvre, 2016, Hubert Robert (1733-1808) Un peintre visionnaire, no. 58). Among that group, the Architectural caprice with the Borghese Gladiator from the Louvre (acc. no. REC 114 recto) displays features and figural groupings very close to those of the Met’s drawing. One can imagine that the exhibition of this exceptional ensemble aroused, in some visitors to the Salon, the wish to possess similar works. By consequence, even if the early provenance of the Met drawing remains unknown, the theme, the large scale of the sheet, and the care with which it was drawn argue that it too was made for the art market around 1780.

Sarah Catala (August, 2017)