‘Hubert Robert, 1733-1808’ Review: The King’s Painter Who Spanned Past and Present

[JB note: In my younger academic days I had hoped to write A History of Ruins -- which turned out to be an inconclusive project. It was inspired by my having lived in Rome as a happy U.S. Foreign Service brat (58-62), in my parents' apartment (25, via Campo Carleo) which overlooked Trajan's Forum (I can still hear its cats meowing). In the eternal city, btw, the production/construction of ruins (less cynically described as renovation) was something of a local industry. How can I doubt that it does not continue to be so :)?]

At the heart of this versatile artist’s work are his imaginative architectural inventions. 

Barrymore Laurence Scherer, Wall Street Journal

Image from article, with caption: ‘The Ponte Salario’ (c. 1775), by Hubert Robert.

Washington

Despite the immense reputation enjoyed by French painter Hubert Robert during his lifetime, there has been no comprehensive American exhibition of his work—apart from a 1978 National Gallery show of his drawings. Thus the National Gallery’s “Hubert Robert, 1733-1808” is as important a retrospective as it is beautiful—not just the first in the U.S. but the first to focus on his achievements both as a painter and as a draftsman. Representing Robert’s long and fruitful career with over 100 paintings and scrupulously chosen works on paper, it has been organized in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre, Paris, by Margaret Morgan Grasselli, the Gallery’s head of the department of Old Master Drawings, and Yuriko Jackall, the Gallery’s assistant curator of French paintings. They are also co-authors of the superb exhibition catalog.

Hubert Robert, 1733-1808

National Gallery of Art 
Through Oct. 2

With his classical education and engaging personality, Robert enjoyed many advantages as an artist in the bustling Paris-Rome circuit in the years before the French Revolution. Moreover, he was industrious and versatile—beyond oil painting, Robert was a commanding watercolorist, printmaker, decorator of interiors and garden designer. In 1778 Louis XVI appointed him Keeper of the King’s Paintings—a royal connection that, with his close aristocratic ties, probably played a part in his imprisonment during the Revolution.

At the heart of Robert’s oeuvre were his imaginative architectural capriccios, combining well-known ancient monuments with then-modern buildings. So potent were these pictorial conflations of past and present—and the vivid sense of historical continuity they conveyed—that he was accorded the nickname “Robert des ruines” by no less a pundit than the French philosopher and encyclopedist Denis Diderot.

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A clue to his formidable artistic gifts is his rapid development into a master draftsman. In his early red chalk drawing “Nave of Santa Maria degli Angeli e Martiri, Rome” (1757/1758) Robert’s uniform, utilitarian parallel hatchings create shadow and volume, but scant visual interest. But “The Wine Press” (c. 1759) reveals Robert already developing a varied, flexible repertoire of hatching strokes and supple outlines. With this greater nuance and dynamism, his drawings quickly transcend mere documentation to become compelling works of art.

Delightful too is his assured figure drawing. Though figures are only incidental to Robert’s architectural views and landscapes, he populates these views with men, women and children whose animated, individualized postures and gestures enliven the scenes with suggestions of narrative.

The beguiling power of Robert’s imagery springs from the ingenuity of his pictorial method. Composed with low, dramatic viewpoints through soaring arches or angled colonnades or from below rises in the landscape, and invigorated by exaggerated perspective and multiple vanishing points, Robert’s paintings offer polychrome counterparts to the majestic architectural etchings of his celebrated Italian contemporary, Giovanni Piranesi, who exerted considerable influence on the younger artist.

Though the imagery is primarily Classical, Robert’s unconventional vistas, articulated with long shadows and saturated subdued color, are often tinged with 18th-century Romanticism. Where other painters might concentrate on the familiar exterior of the Roman Colosseum, Robert’s oil “Interior of the Colosseum” (c. 1759) lets us peer outward toward the daylit Arch of Constantine through a gloomy curving tunnel-like gallery heaped with rubble.

Robert produced some of his most intimate, poignant works while confined during the Revolution to the bleak interiors of Saint-Lazare prison. Among these, “Feeding the Prisoners of Saint-Lazare” (1794) depicts inmates hungrily reaching out from a walled-off staircase to milkmaids passing out pails of sustenance.

Released from prison, Robert was eventually appointed curator of the newly established Louvre Museum, where he served until his death. Two late capriccios movingly serve as the exhibition’s valedictory works. His elegiac “View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins” (1796) includes a young artist (possibly meant to be Raphael) copying a bronze cast of the ancient Apollo Belvedere. In its pendant, “Project for the Transformation of the Grand Galérie” (1796), Robert shows his suggested skylights, which would be installed years later, while depicting himself copying Raphael’s “Holy Family.” After the disasters of revolution, both images convey Robert’s consoling message—particularly apt today—of history’s enduring continuity and its power to inspire the future.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.