Figure studies mounted on an album page

Hubert Robert was among the most sought-after landscape painters in eighteenth-century Paris. His landscapes were at times accurate depictions of actual sights, and other times capriccios, whimsical re-combinations of recognizable elements. His scenes, moreover, were often crafted to inspire revery, exploring notions of past and future.


He spent seven years in Rome, where he was a close friend of Jean-Honoré Fragonard. The figure studies he made in Italy, presumably from life, capture the naturalistic poses of a variety of figures as they went about their daily lives. Cut and pasted into albums, these figures would be used to populate Robert’s paintings back in Paris and throughout his life.


In this sheet, for instance, the sketch of the musician at upper right was used for the central figure in The Dance, also in the Met’s collection (17.190.28). The painting was one of the panels commissioned by the king’s brother, the comte d’Artois’ for his new pleasure building, the Bagatelle.


At lower right, Robert has pasted three figure studies by his friend and collaborator, Jean Robert Ango. Ango’s figures are smaller in scale than Robert’s and executed in his signature emphatic style, but Robert brings the work of the two artists into dialogue with his whimsical arrangement of sketches along the lower margin of the sheet.