Classical Landscape with Two Women Sketching
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Oil painting of a landscape with classical ruins and two women sketching. The women sit and stand on the right on a hill top with a deep valley behind and a hill in the distance, with a cliff into the valley. Mountains appear in the left background. Part of a wall of a ruined building, with a section of a coffered apse and a corinthian column, appears to the left. Foliage grows on it. Large slabs of stone appear in the left foreground. The women wear long white muslin dresses, the one sitting also wears a red shawl that has slipped down. She holds a large sketch pad on her knee and draws on it. She faces the left in profile. Her companion stands behind her, also facing the left. She holds a large sketch pad under her arm. She holds out her right towards the slabs on the left, her arm extended. Further ruins and trees appear on the hill behind.
Two overdoor paintings at Waddesdon demonstrate Hubert Robert's life-long interest in depicting figures, including women artists, in imaginary classical landscapes (see also acc. no. 120.1195). Painted around the mid 1790s, they indicate how Robert adapted his views of ruins to changing fashions and tastes during the French Revolution.
In this painting, the pose of the standing woman, and the combination of a standing and seated draughtsman, is very similar to figures depicted in two sketches Robert made in the mid 1790s of artists drawing in the Grande Galerie of the Louvre (Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 37336, recto and verso). However, in these drawings the artists are a man and a woman, rather than two women as here. However, in 1786, Robert had depicted two ladies drawing amongst ancient ruins in a watercolour acquired shortly after by the wife of the director of the Bâtiments du Roi (Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF 31695). He constructed that design from sketches of Roman ruins and statues that he had seen during his travels to Italy combined with a study of Parisian women wearing the latest fashions of large hats trimmed with feathers. In the Waddesdon painting, Robert utilised the same concept but sited the women, dressed in the more simple style of the mid-1790s, amongst ruins reminiscent of the rugged landscape around Tivoli in Italy.
Classically educated in France, the young Hubert Robert went to Italy in 1754 with the Comte de Stainville, later the Duc de Choiseul, whose portrait hangs at Waddesdon (acc. no. 155.2008). He remained in Italy for eleven years, specialising in architectural views, often of ruins, and sometimes from his imagination. Returning to Paris in 1765, Robert continued to use his Italian sketches for the bases of his many works produced over the next half century. He also made scenes based on famous Parisian buildings.
On his return to France, Robert was quickly made a member of the French Royal Academy of Painting. He exhibited regularly at the Salon, and received several royal appointments, including Garde des Tableaux of the Musée Royal in 1784. During the early years of the Revolution, Robert kept his position and designed schemes for the re-planning of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, now a museum. He was imprisoned in 1793-4, but continued to produce work. These wild landscapes invoke the aesthetic experience of the 'Sublime', much appreciated during the 1790s.
Phillippa Plock, 2012
Dimensions (mm) / weight (mg)
1160 x 1340 (sight size)
Signature & date
not signed or dated
Provenance
- Acquired from Fobsfal by a Rothschild Family Trust in 1985.
Collection
- Waddesdon (Rothschild Family)
- On loan since 1995