IMAGINARY GARDENS OF HUBERT ROBERT, National Museum in Belgrade, 2012

NATIONAL MUSEUM

B elgrade 2012

From the Treasures of the National Museum 5

PublisherNational Museum in Belgradewww.narodnimuzej.rs

Editor in chiefTatjana Cvjetićanin

ReviewsIrina SubotićMiroslav Timotijević

TranslationJelena Erdeljan

ProofreadingBiljana Đordjevic

Graphic design:Irena Stepancic

Pre-pressBlueprint

PrintPublikum

Circulation300

ISBN 978-86-7269-129-0

Copyright National Museum in Belgrade. All rights reserved.

SAŠA BRAJOVIĆ AND TATJANA BOŠNJAK

of HUBERT ROBERT

I M AGI NA RY GARDENS

The Collection of Foreign Art of the National Museum includes two paintings by Hubert Robert (1733-1808), one of the leading French artists of the second half of the 18th century, a master of fantastic vedutta, landscapes and capricci with representations of ruins, known as Robert des Ruines, official Dessinateur des Jardins du Roi of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, instated as the first keeper of royal art collections and thus, one could also say the first custodian of the Louvre. The two paintings, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola and The Park on the Lake are expressed and representative examples of Robert’s style and opus. Since their arrival at the National Museum in 1949, these paintings remained uninvestigated and without adequate publication, so that they remained unknown to both the academic and the general public.

Saša Brajović, professor of art history at the Faculty of Philosophy in Belgrade, and Tatjana Bošnjak, museum counselor and custodian of the Collection of Foreign Art, are the authors of the book which offers the first exhaustive analysis of Robert’s paintings from the National Museum, examined in the context of the creative opus of this artist as well as in the much broader context of stylistic and iconographic tendencies of French art of the day. New insights and interpretations which the authors reached through their dedicated research constitute a significant contribution to the study of French art of this era and, at the same time, offer important input to the popularization of the collections kept at the National Museum.

It is precisely with this aim that the edition From the Treasures of the National Museum was initiated – to offer inspiring enticement to the public for new and renewed encounters with chosen masterpieces of the National Museum through the hereby presented broad insights of its custodians and experts from various professional backgrounds into the more or less well known, or entirely unfamiliar works of art from its collections.

The issues already published speak clearly of the extent of necessity to make the rich, complex and diverse treasures of the museum accessible for further research, interpretation and open to the public. In resuming work on this series, after a ten year period, following the initiative and idea of Tatjana Bošnjak, whose career at the National Museum - which should serve as both a model and an inspiration - ended painfully in 2011, we received a book, together with an exhibition organized on the occasion of its publishing, which is a successful combination of two goals: it presents the extraordinary works of art kept at the Museum in a reliable, valuable and thorough manner - the fruit of collaboration among professionals in the field, and stands, at the same time, as an obligatory point of reference at the foundation of any future research in this domain as well as of a new, fuller experience in understanding history and art.

These are results the National Museum believes it should always offer to the professional and general public.

Tatjana CvjetićaninDirector of the National Museum

Imaginary Gardens of Hubert Robert in the Collection of the National Museum in Belgrade ......9

Huber Robert and French Culture of the 18th Century ..................................................................13An artist of the Age of Enlightenment ..............................................................................................13To be born in Paris... ...........................................................................................................................17Education in Rome ..............................................................................................................................18Paris: Academy, salons and Robert des Ruines ................................................................................20In the service of the king .....................................................................................................................23Fame. Honnête homme .......................................................................................................................24Revolution, accusation, rehabilitation ...............................................................................................28

The Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola ............................................................ 31Painters and patrons ............................................................................................................................34The fate of the painting in the 20th century ......................................................................................52Technical characteristics of the painting ...........................................................................................54The Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola and aesthetics of the picturesque .....56

The Park on the Lake .................................................................................................................... 67The Park on the Lake and the picturesque garden ...........................................................................75

Bibliography .....................................................................................................................................82

List of illustrations ...........................................................................................................................88

Index .......................................................................................................................................91

CONTENTS

8 • I m a g i n a r y G a r d e n s o f H u b e r t R o b e r t

IMAGINARY GARDENS represented as idealized landscapes, picturesque capricci, timeless landscape-architectural fantasies, are typical forms of French 18th century culture and aesthetics. The Collection of European Art of the National Museum in Belgrade includes two paintings which fully il-lustrate that particular current of visual culture in France. They are the work of Hubert Robert (1733–1808), one of the leading French artists of the second half of the 18th century – a painter of veduttas, landscapes, architectural capr-icci – also known as Robert des Ruines. Robert was the official designer of the royal gardens of Louis XVI (Dessinateur des Jardins du Roi), the first guardian (Gardien) of the royal art collections and the first curator of the Louvre. His art embraced the epoch of the ancien régime, as well as the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period.

The Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola (fig. 1) and the Park on the lake (fig. 2), are distinctive and representative examples of Rob-ert’s work.1 They are imaginary gardens with interpolated and juxaposed real and fantastic achitectural and landscape elements, a combination of ruins as relics of past civilizations and genre scenes with a typical repertoire of acceso-ries rendered with supreme artistic interpretation.

Although the art scene of the day in France witnessed the activity of a large group of artistis of similar thematic and stylistic orientation - Jean Charles Delafosse, Charles Michel-Ange Challe, Louis Joseph Lellorain, Jacques Henri Alexandre Pernet, Jean-Robert Ango – who supplied the art market with pop-ular Piranesian fantasies and caprichos of ruins, during his lifetime Hubert Robert enjoyed unsurpassed esteem and held a special place in the society, one he was able to regain even after the Revolution, while interest for his work did not wane even in later times.

A well established painter of highest academic ranking, with patrons from the high aristocracy and the royal family, Robert was a very productive art-ist. Still, notwithstanding a number of monographs on the subject of his life

1 Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, oil on canvas 218 x 149 cm, Inv. no. 34 -146 and Park on the lake, oil on canvass, 31.5 x 40 cm, Inv. no. 34 - 144.

Imaginary Gardens of Hubert Robert in the Collection of the National Museum in Belgrade

1. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, oil on canvas, 1768-1769, National Museum in Belgrade

10 • I m a g i n a r y G a r d e n s o f H u b e r t R o b e r t

The edition From the Treasures of the National Museum in Belgrade ena-bles the publication of the integral version of the text produced as a result of the study of Hubert Robert’s works from the National Museum, contextual-ized within his entire opus as well as the cultural epoch to which they belong. Segments of this text and preliminary results of research of Robert’s works have been brought to the attention of the academic public through texts pub-lished in scholarly periodicals.6 It is our desire that this publication of the in-tegral version of the text accompanied by high quality illustrations related to Robert’s works from the collection of the National Museum, as well as of the comparative material significant for their better understanding, be a contri-bution to their adequate art historical, scholarly and professional evaluation and interpretation. We hope that the Imaginary Gardens of Hubert Robert shall inspire curiosity and awaken the interest of the museum loving public and the readers, that it shall unveil before them the aesthetic and intellectual contents which took us, the authors of the text, through the lavish world of a personal artistic vision of French culture of the 18th century.

6 Listed in note no. 3.

and works, his vast opus has yet to be fully reconstructed and integrally pub-lished.2

Many of Robert’s works which, as a result of the exceptional popularity they enjoyed among their contemporaries and collectioners of later epochs, were kept in private collections and are now (re)appearing as new discoveries.

Despite the fact that they had long been exhibited as part of the perma-nent collection and reproduced a number of times, the two paintings from the National Museum have not yet been thoroughly studied nor published with all the relevant data. They belong to a large group of Robert’s works which are now being “uncovered” not only before the viewing public but also before the scholars and researches of his opus.3 Although they are just two of his paint-ings representing imaginary veduttas, they offer characteristic insight into the work of Hubert Robert and, to a great measure, reveal him as an artist. The monumental composition of the Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, created, most probably, as part of a decorative ensemble intended for some representative space, sums up, both thematically and visually, the experience of Robert’s artistic education and formation in Italy. The Park on the lake – a smaller, much more intimate and later painting, is a sublimate of Robert’s overall creation.

Both Robert’s paintings arrived at the National Museum in 1949 as part of a contingent of valuables and works of the visual and applied arts which arrived in Yugoslavia from Germany as a form of war restitution. Objects from this corpus were distributed among the various state institutions. Based on evaluations brought about by a professional committee, by decree of the Reparations Committee and Ministry of Science and Culture of the Govern-ment of FPRY, Robert’s paintings were handed over for safekeeping to the National Museum in Belgrade.4 From that time on, works of Hubert Robert have been a part of the European of Foreign Art and, more precisely, the cor-pus of French art.5

2 A critical catalogue of Robert’s works has not yet been published (it is being prepared by Wildenstein & Co, authors: J. Baillio, G. Wildenstein). The most significant monographs on the life and works of Hubert Robert are: C. Gabillot, Hubert Robert et son temps, Librairie de l’art, Paris 1895 ; P. de Nolhac, Hubert Robert 1733-1808, Paris 1910; J.de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, Paris 1987; J. de Cayeux, C. Boulot, Hubert Robert, Paris 1989 ; P. R. Radisich, Hubert Robert. Painted Spaces of the Enlightenment, Cambridge Univ. Pr. 1998.

3 The first results of a detailed art historical study and technical investigation of Robert’s works from the National Museum, created as a part of a research project have been published in the follow-ing texts: Т. Бошњак, С. Брајовић, Степениште парка палате Фарнезе у Капрароли Ибера Робера у Народном музеју у Београду, Зборник Народног музеја 19-2 (2010), 137-174 and С. Брајовић, Т. Бошњак, Парк на језеру Ибера Робера у Народном музеју у Београду, Зборник Матице српске за ликовне уметности 38, Нови Сад 2010, 79-96.

4 Архив Југославије: 54-319-483: Уметнички музеј, бр. 501 од 2.VII 1949. Записник и листа предмета под бр. 9 и 16.

5 The corpus of French art was created as an ecclectic entity from several fundamental sources and contains circa 190 works of painting and sculpture. It is a part of the Collection of Euro-pean Art. The Cabinet of Graphic Art also has in its collection more than 300 drawings and prints of French artists: Т. Бошњак, Француско слирство у Београду. Формирање и улога јавне колекције, Зборник Народног музеја 19-2 (2010), 501-533.

2. Hubert Robert, The Park on the Lake, 1770-1780, oil on canvas, National Museum in Belgrade

Hubert Robert and French Culture of the 18th century

An artist of the Age of Enlightenment

THE ART OF HUBERT ROBERT, (fig. 3), as demonstrated so evidently by his paintings from the National Museum of Belgrade, can not be fully en-compassed by categories of style such as Roccoco and Neoclassicism. It is just as impossible to define by the subjects he painted. Robert’s personality and pictural poetics can not be entirely determined as expressions of the ancien régime, the revolutionary or post-revolutionary age. His times were far more complex than the one-sided polarities which lie at the core of the attempts to grasp the age of the 18th century in France.

The works of Hubert Robert reflect the social and cultural concepts of his epoch. He spent most of his life in a socio-political system inherited from the 17th century, one of highly developed techniques of control and political government.1 During the 18th century, despite constant striving for reform, es-pecially in the legal and the economic domain, the ancien régime became ever deeper confronted with demographic, intellectual and economic changes in French society.2 These would gradually lead to the Revolution of 1789, which redefined social and political relations, cultural and artistic creation and af-fected dramatically the lives of all, including Robert.

Robert was a man of the Age of Enlightenment which believed, although in many different ways, in the possibility of overall progress. Still, as an intel-lectual and cultural movement, Enlightenment was far from monolithic in its approaches, even in its central point – the role of reason.3 Therefore, the “Age of Reason“ is far more precisely determined as the the “Age of Sensibil-ity“. Sensibility is the axial determinant of reflections of the Enlightenment as a movement on history, metaphysics, law, philology, politics and aesthetics.4

The complex dialectic of social and intellectual currents implied an equal-ly complex dialectic of styles. The French monarchy, especially from the time

1 On that in: P. R. Campbell, Power and Politics in Old Regime France 1720-1745, London, New York 2003.

2 O. Ranum, Paris in the Age of Absolutism: An Essay, The Pennsylvania St. Univ. 2002, 3.3 On the contradictory aspects of the Enlightenment: I. Paul, The Age of Minerva, Vol. 1, Coun-

ter-Rational Reason in the Eighteenth Century. Goya and the Paradigm of Unreason in Western Europe, Pennsylvania Univ. Pr. 1995; S. J. Barnett, The Enlightenment and Religion. The Myths of Modernity, Manchester Univ. Pr. 2003.

4 On different views of sensibility and the ambiguity of the term sentir in French Enlightenment: J. C. О’Neal, The Authority of Experience: Sensationist Theory in the French Enlightenment, Pennsylvania. Univ. Pr. 1996, 86.

3. Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Hubert Robert, 1788, oil on can-vas, INV3055, Мusée du Louvre, Paris © Мusée du Louvre RMN / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

14 • I m a g i n a r y G a r d e n s o f H u b e r t R o b e r t B I O G R A P H Y • 15

Dubos’s reflections on aesthetics were part of the phenomenon of democ-ratisation of culture. The word culture carried a broad spectrum of meaning in the 18th century. Still, regardless of the differences, French intellectuals de-fine it in epistemological terms as a relation between the body and the mind, that which perceives and that which is perceived, subject and object. Roccoco culture, of which Robert was very much a part, expressed such interaction.

From the middle of the 18th century, in its own manner, it also found ex-pression in the Neoclassicist ideology of art. It, however, establishes the dif-ferentiation between the art of consuming as opposed to sensual pleasures and those active on the level of the senses. Neoclassicist aesthetic, like that of the Roccoco, had heterogeneous roots. The transition to the new style was grounded in the efforts of Louis XVI to express the legitimacy and continuity of Bourbon rule in direct line from form Antiquity. The art market also sought classical heroic subjects and forms. The intellectual culture of the Enlighten-ment was preoccupied with the possibilities of the optical, but was at the same time also revolted with the “frauds“ that art could produce. From the middle of the century on there is an ever stronger reaction against pleasure as the goal of art for it was seen as detrimental to moral wellbeing. Art grounded in the aesthetics of the sensual became the subject of criticism initiated by resons of moral and aesthetic nature. Protest against hedonism and the promulgation of civic duty, the public and didactic role of art, was presented already in De Sent Jen’s pamphlet L’Ombre du Grand Colbert, le Louvre et la Ville de Paris. LikeVoltaire, in the epoch of Louis XVI he, too, saw a cure for the frivolity of his age in classical models and “noble and grand simplicity“.9

Fascination with nature and its charms, inherited from previous decades, gains new impulse. Thus, classicism in French painting, as demonstrated by the works of Robert, including those from the National Museum in Belgrade, functioned as a model of both the most natural and the “most civilised“.

The change in aesthetic judgement was based on the expansion of cul-ture in France apparent in the growing production of books, newspapers, theatre pieces, the growth of the reading and theatre public, presentation of works of art at the Salon and alternative exhibition events and venues such as the Еxposition de la jeunesse, Académie de Saint-Luc, Salon de la Corre-spondance.10 The growing cultural production aided the development of a new phenomenon – public opinion.11 New forces on the political scene presented new requirements which could not be fulfilled within the framework of the traditional institutions of absolutist order. That “new system of authority“, a

9 On that and the importance of visual culture in 18th century France: J. Landes, Visualizing the Nation: Gender, Representation, and Revolution in Eighteenth-Century France, Ithaca, Cornell Univ. Pr. 2001.

10 At the beginning of the century around 1000 books had been printed in France while in the year of the Revolution that number was multiplied by four. Three daily papers were being pub-lished at the beginning of the 18th century, approximately twenty around the middle of same the century, and more than eighty from 1785 on. On the culture of pronounced bibliophilia: J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment. Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750, Oxford 2001, 119.

11 J. Habermas, Javno mnjenje, Beograd 1969.

of Louis XIV, figured as an active patron in the production and perception of art and the debate on style, the quality of which was regarded as an expression of national merit.5 Style was construed as the fruit of complex interaction of different social groups, interests and experiences of production, distribution and consumption. The crown could not entirely monopolize style, especially after the royal court had been moved from Versailles to Palais-Royal in Paris at the beginning of the 18th century. The return to Paris initiated the creation of new styles, later named the Roccoco, the qualities of which are evidently present in the pictorial idiom of Robert.

Roccoco was based on court culture and aristocratic mentality, but it was just as much an expression of the taste of the new, bourgeoisie elite. This is a style of aristocratic elegance unhampered by utilitarian requirements. Rocco-co art rejects propagandistic aims, the imperative of historicism and didactic function. It is an expression of the stance of the epoch on visual culture as an exceptional medium of communication.6 Imaginary representation of beauty of the natural world, the essence of Roccoco design and Robert’s paintings, answers fully the facsination of Enlightenment with nature.

The sensual aesthetics of Roccoco, which imbue Robert’s paintings, were wholly explained by l’abbé Dubos in his Reflections of 1719. His ideas were the foundation of Enlightenment views on aesthetic sensationism, perceived as the point of breaking up with the past and the possibility of reevaluation of culture. The main goal of art, according to Dubos, was to arouse emotions.7 They were central to aesthetic judgement for they lead to recognizing the quality of a poem or a picture. Aesthetic deliberation is an inborn characteris-tic of the physical and mental constitution of men.8 Sensationism is universal and, therefore, everyone, and not just the specialists, can judge art. Dubos’s ideas gave the new bourgeoisie public the feeling of power of critical reflec-tion, the ability of passing judgements in the domain of poetry and painting, until then reserved only for the authorities.

5 On style as a political concept in France: L. Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France, University of California Press 1998, 35-39.

6 The idea that the main goal of painting is communication, an invitation extended to the be-holder to take part in “the conversation“ with the represented figures, which transforms the act of observing into an act of exchange and thus affects the development of art criticism and the rise in significance accorded to the public as an arbiter of tase, was presented already by Roger de Piles, honorary member of the Academy, in Conversations sur la connoissance de la peinture 1677. and Cours de peinture par principes 1708: J. Montagu, The Painted Enigma and French Seventeenth-Century Art, Journal of the Courtauld and Warburg Institutes 31 (1968), 307-335.

7 “Because the primary goal of poetry and painting is to touch us, poems and paintings are good only if they can do just that “ (II: 22, 276). “If the painter is emotionally involved in the action he is representing, he moves us; what he is representing is far less significant“ (I: 13, 34): Abbé Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, D. Désirat ed., Paris 1993.

8 Dubos relied on the epistemology of experience of John Lock, especially in formulating his judgments on beauty. Experience encompasses sensibility, the ability to feel and accumulate knowledge gained from emotions. One of Dubos's main contributions to the aesthetics of the Enlightenment is his opinion that culture evolves from nature. He redefines the culture of his day, moves it closer to nature. His concepts of aesthetics as a net of psychology and epistemology has political implications for they democratise taste: J. C. 0’Neal, Changing Minds: The Shifting Perception of Culture in Eighteenth-Century France, The Univ. of Delaware Pr. 2002, 25-26.


To be born in Paris...

Robert’s personal and artistic identity was formed in an epoch which must be viewed as a heterogeneous model of ideas, ideologies and aesthetics. He was born in Paris in 1733 which added a special tone to his later reputation: “To be born in Paris meant to be double the Frenchman, for it is here that the flowers of urbanity are nurtured and are not to be found elsewhere“ (fig. 4).16 His father served as valet de chambre with the marquis De Stainville, thus, a member of the bourgeoisie elite.17 From the age of twelve to his eighteenth year (1745-1751), owing to the patronate of marquis de Stainville’s son who became his mentor, Robert receives a solid classical education at the Jesuit Collège de Navarre at the University of Paris.18 As attested by his biographer, the art collector Pierre Jean Mariette, Robert discovered a talent for les arts du dessin and, against his father’s will, became an assistant in René Michel-Ange Slodtz’s decoration studio.19 Some of Robert’s biographers speak also of his education in the studio of the painter Pierre-Jacques Cazes.20

16 L. S. Mercier, Tableau de Paris I, Amsterdam 1782-1788, ix, after J. Hedley, François Boucher. Seductive Visions, ex. cat. Wallace Collections, London 2004, 99.

17 The position of Hubert Robert’s father was the subject of discussion in several texts. There is an explanation that the quoted term actually denoted a very high administrative office: J. de Cayeux, C. De Boulot, Hubert Robert, Paris 1989, 23.

18 Along with Collège de Navarre, Collège de Beauvais is also identified as Robert’s school: J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert, in: Dictionary of Art, Oxford 1996, Vol IV, 447-450, 448.

19 Ph. De Chènevières, A. de Montaiglon, Abecedario de P. J. Mariette, vol. IV, Paris 1857-1858, 413-414.

20 P. de Nolhac, Hubert Robert 1733-1808, Paris 1910.

tribunal of a sort which becomes equal to traditional arbiters of merit – the crown and the church – was not exclusively bourgeoisie but was, rather, deep-ly influences by the elite, the state and tradition.12

Key in the shaping of public opinion was the rhetoric of civic virtue.13 Denis Diderot, François Vincent Toussaint and de Montesquieu, whose ideas stemmed from a broader scope of concepts of the first half of the 18th century, exerted a decisive influence on the concept of virtue. The rhetoric of political virtue infiltrated the overall cultural production: the popular literary genre – the novel, and, in particular, the theatre, where, owing to Diderot, a new political genre of the theatre emerged – the drame bourgeois.14 Again, as a re-sult of Diderot’s activities, that rhetoric is introduced into a new literary form – art criticism. It influenced the production and reception or art works and the formation of artistic personalities. As anticipated, it also affected Robert, not only as a phenomenon of the times but also because his paintings and he himself had been the focus of Diderot’s critiques for years.

Diderot’s critiques of the Salons from 1759 until 1781 form the basis of modern art criticism.15 Most often they are set against the lack of relevant subjects in contemporaneous painting. Diderot believed that art must be truthful and emotionally binding. His judgements are mortally opposed to allusive mythologies, the picturesque manner, non-expressive figures, because they are not seen as visual embodiment of Diderot’s ideals – namely, peinture morale. Such were the concepts which guided the late phase of Robert’s art.

12 While Habermas identifies the public sphere with one single social group – the bourgeoisie, more recent studies show that it is not fundamentally a bourgeois, or exclusively a secular phenomenon. Today, it is emphasized that there is no “emergence“ of public opinion, but a relatively slow evolution grounded in the traditional, religious and political: D. Gordon, D. Bell, S. Maza, The Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century, A Forum in French Historical Stud-ies XVII/4 (1992), 882-956; J. I. Israel, op. cit., 5; A. Bell, Culture and religion, у: Old Regime France 1648-1788, W. Doyle ed., Oxford 2001, 78-104.

13 The concept of virtue lies at the heart of political, social and ethical thought of the 18th century. It carried a number of different meanings and functions. Ideas of political organization and social order based on virtue have their roots in the classical republican tradition, but the need to participate in public life was essentially different: M. Linton, Politics of Virtue in Enlighten-ment France Studies in Modern History, Palgrave 2001, 52.

14 In place of traditional heros of the theatre from classical mythology and biographies of great men, bourgeois drama introduces heros from the ordinary world and demonstrates the ways in which they contribute to the virtue of family and society. Diderot's dramas Le Fils naturel of 1757 and Le Pere da famille of 1758, as well as theoretical works Entretiens sur Le Fils naturel of 1757 and De la Poesie dramatique, establish that new type of hero. The new genre, in Diderot’s opinion, united men of different social background, strenghtened natural and family ties and encouraged participation in public life: The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama, J. Gassner, E. Quinn eds., Dover 2002, 179-180.

15 R. Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism: From the Ancien Régime to the Rеstoration, Ox-ford Univ. Pr., 1995; cf. Diderot on Art, 2. vols, J. Goodman ed., New Haven and London 1995.

4. Louis-Nicolas de Lespinasse, Port au Ble et Pont Notre-Dame, 1782, oil on canvas, Musée Carnavalet, Paris © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet

B I O G R A P H Y • 19

While in Rome, Robert was in personal contact with the leaders of the ne-oclassicist avant-garde. He studied at the time when Johann Joachim Winck-elmann was employed as the librarian of cardinal Alessandro Albani, in whose palace, as a protege of De Chouiselle, he was gladly received. Тhere he met Robert Adam and Charles-Louis Clerisseau. Dominating the the artist of the same circle was Giovanni Battista Piranesi, painter and archaeologist, who had a studio on the Via del Corso, right across from the Académie de France. Piranesi’s response to Antiquity, at once empirical and visionary, had an im-pact on Robert’s imaginary and monumental architectural forms inhabited by small figures of people. Panini had an even stronger influence on Robert. He was a professor of perspective at the French Academy in Rome. Robert’s con-temporaries, especially his mentor Nattuar, pointed out that Robert painted in the manner of Panini.25 The art dealer Paillet wrote that Robert considered Panini to be the most inspiring of artists. He had in his possession 25 paint-ings by this master, whom he considered to be le trésor de ses études, second only to la Nature.26 His admiration of Panini implied also a deep respect of

25 J. D. Bandiera, Form and Meaning in Hubert Robert’s Ruin Caprices: Four Paintings of Fictive Ruins for the Château de Méréville, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 15/1, An Educated Taste: Neoclassicism at the Art Institute, 1989, 20-37, 82-85, 83, footnote 11.

26 Paye publish a catalogue of the posthumous sale of Robert’s paintings in 1809: С. Gabillot, Hubert Robert et son temps, Librairie de l’art, Paris 1895, 258-259.

Education in Rome

As a member of De Stainville’s retinue, later also of the duke De Choiseul and the French ambassador at the Papal court of Benedict XIV, in 1754 Robert leaves for Rome. The patronage of the marquis enrolled him at the Académie de France à Rome which, at that time, functioned under the direction of Charles-Joseph Nattoire.21 Marquis de Marigny, the minister of the arts under Louis XV, awarded him the status of pensionnaire in 1759, a common posi-tion for all students sponsored by the crown. He held that status until 1762 but remained in Italy even after the completion of his education as a result of the munificence of his patrons.22

As a member of the suite of abbot De Saint-None, together with his colleague Jean Honoré Fragonard, in 1760 Robert travelled to Naples, Pes-tum and other cities of southern Italy. During this journey he made notes, drawings and watercolours and De Saint-None had some prints produced after some of them.23 Robert copied statues from the collections and mu-seums he saw in Rome and Naples, as well as those of the relics of Pompeii and Herculanum which, at time, were still inaccessible. His drawings and watercolours of 1760 already display the entire Robert repertoire: over-turned vases and ancient columns, mothers with children and the “una-voidable dog“ (fig. 5).24 Robert developed a method of work based on the use of prints of drawings which served as the bacground for ink lavage and watercolour. Because he gave the finished works away as presents to his friend, many of his pictures are preserved only as prints. Because of their erudite references and sophisticated imagination, even then Robert’s drawings were acquired by notable art lovers and collectors – the prince and judge De Breteuil and Mariette.

Robert’s entire opus reflects his formation in the cultural milieu of mid-eighteenth century Rome when that city was the centre of evolution of a new aesthetics focused on the quest for fresh inspiration which, indeed, it found in the formal idiom of ancient art. His edification in the company of young artists inspired by archaeological discoveries and thirsty for a renaissance of the arts, determined Robert’s opus. It shaped entirely his vocabulary of ar-chitectural and sculptural forms which he kept recreating, recomposing and recontextualising throughout his career.

21 The French Academy in Rome, founded in 1666, as a branch of the Royal Academy in Paris, was located at several addresses in the course of its existence. From 1725 to 1802, during Rob-ert’s stay in Rome, it was located at Palazzo Mancini.

22 On Robert’s Roman years we learn from the correspondence of Marigny, surintendant des Bâti-ments du Roi, and Nattoire, directeur de l’Académie de France, as well as from letters sent by Mariette to l’abbé Paciaudi and count Caylus: J. de Cayeux, C. De Boulot, Hubert Robert, 24-30, 46,71,77, 81; V. Carlson, Hubert Robert in Rome. Some Pen-and-Wash Drawings, Master Draw-ings 39/3 (2001), 288-299.

23 Abbot De Saint-None, archaeologist and collectioner, achieved great success with his book Le voyage Pittoresque de Naples et des Deux Sicile, 1778-1786, illustrated by Robert and Fragonard.

24 J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, Paris 1987, 30.

5. Hubert Robert, Villa Aldobrandini in Fras-cati, XV-Rr.2040, 1762, watercolor on paper, © Princess Czartorsky Foun-dation deposited with the National Museum in Krakow


drawings. At the following Salon, in 1769, as we are informed by the livret, Robert, whose name is accompanied by the epithet Académicien, presented around 40 paintings and drawings.29 Critics Diderot and Louis Petit de Bachaumont who published in the L’Année Littéraire pointed out that Robert enriched the Salon with grand paintings and drawings. From the words of Mariette we learn that Robert’s works were very much sought after on the market.30 As a result of favour-able critiques, Robert’s career took off on a high note.

Robert makes his entrance on the grand stage of Paris through Parisian salons, too. They were the liminal points at which the aristocratic and the bourgeoisie touched, as well as the domestic and the public, the feminine and the masculine, Roccoco and Neoclassicism. They drew together people of different backgrounds who shaped the social, political, linguistic and aesthetic ideal of the 18th century.31 Robert was accepted at one of the most popular salons – that of madame Geofrin, one of the leading protagonists of the public sphere. Her salon was a place which determined culture, a bureau des amateurs, a sort of petite république des arts.32 A salon dedicated to the visual arts, an invention of Madame, was held on Mondays and gathered together artists, art dealers and collectors. Lundis were an expression of the rising status of artists and collectors of art and of the new relation between the patrons and the creators. That relation is explained by Diderot who points out that the patron must not determine the subject. Should he desire a painting, he must allow the artist to choose the theme himself; even better, he should actually buy an already completed work of art.33 While at the beginning of the 18th century collectors focused on acquiring works of Italian, Dutch and Flemish painters, Ge-ofrin, like other contemporary art lovers, made acquisitions of the works of living French artists.

The changing relation between the patron and the artist was affected by the rising commercialisation of artistic production, a phenomenon typical of Robert’s age.34 The salon of madame Geofrin which engaged in discussions on 29 J. de Cailleux, Hubert Robert’s Submissions to the Salon 1769, The Burlington Magazine 117/871

(1975), i-xv.30 From Correspondance des Directeurs, des Batiments et de l’Académie de France à Rome we learn

that, with the approval of esteemed individuals, Robert gave Mariette some of his drawings of ancient and modern monuments: С. Gabillot, op. cit., 95-98.

31 Among other things, the salons were the product of the need of the new economic elite to forge bonds with the aristocracy and thus gain political power. The salons were not entirely separated from the court, because some were held by women who were very much present at the courst but, despite the intertwining, the court and the salons remained two different social, political and cultural spaces: A. Daumard, Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France depuis 1815, Paris 1987, 56, 109-111; D. Goodman, Enlightenment salons: the convergence of female and philo-sophic ambitions, Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1989), 329-350.

32 The social roots of Madame were bourgeoise, as were those of the artists. She visited the artists in their studios, commissioned their works for her collection and, as she wrote, was their friend (“...because I visited them, saw to it that they received commissions, respected and payed them well“): C. B. Bailey, Quel dommage qu’une telle dispersion: Collectors of French Painting and the French Revolution, in: 1789: French Art during the Revolution, A. Wintermune ed., New York 1989, 11-26; A. P. Galabrun, The Birth of Intimacy: Privacy and Domestic Life in Early Modern Paris, Philadelphia 1991, 154-165.

33 A. Daumard, Les bourgeois et la bourgeoisie en France depuis 1815, Paris 1987, 56, 109-111.34 On that in: T. Crow, The abandoned hero. The decline of state authority in the direction of French

painting as seen in the career of one exemplary theme, 1777-89, у: Consumption of Culture 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text, A. Bermingham, J. Brewer eds., London 1995, 89-102.

Rome: many of his drawings are inscribed with Roma quae forit ipsae ruinae docent, and he even signed a number of works in the Latinised genitive – H. Roberti, Romae. The city of cities, the incomparable caput mundi, remained a asting memory at the very foundation of Robert’s entire opus.

Paris: The Academy, Salons and Robert des Ruines

He returned to Paris in 1765. Already in 1766 he became a member of the Royal Academy of the Arts. His early admission to Académie Royale de pein-ture et de sculpture was an exceptional event because it rarely happened that an artist would apply and be admitted in the course of a single session. Robert applied at the suggestion of the painter Joseph Vernet, and the master who signed his admission was the director and rector of the Academy, François Boucher. As morceau de réception, his accession piece, he contributed the painting entitled the The Port of Ripetta at Rome (fig. 6).27 He was registered as peintre de l’architecture et des ruines. The following year he married Anne-Gabrielle Soos28 and for the first time appeared at the Salon where he would exhibit his works regularly throughout the years, until 1798.

Artists of Robert’s day were aware of the importance of exhibiting their work to the public. Their production was a form of self-representation on the contem-porary public scene. At the time of his first presentation at the Salon in 1767, Rob-ert exhibited 13 paintings and a significant number of studies, watercolours and

27 Robert painted the first version of the composition in 1761 for count de Choiselles (Collection Liechtenstein, Vaduz).

28 Hubert Robert had four children in his marriage and they all died at an early age.

6. Hubert Robert, Vue du Port de Ripetta, a Rome, 1766, oil on canvas, Ecole Nationale Supérieurе des Beaux-Arts, Paris


In the service of the king

The sympathy of count d’Angiviller, director of Royal foundations and minis-ter of fine arts of Louis XVI, secured for Robert the support of the most im-portant patron – the king.40 Judging by d’Angiviller’s correspondence, we can conclude that he and Robert were friends. In those days patrons and artists used terms such as friends and friendship, ami and amitié, as an expression of trust and loyalty.41 The minister’s support secured Robert the commission for the decoration of the dining hall at the palace of Fontainebleau.42 The same official is also credited with procuring Robert the commission to decorate the salle de bains, boudoire of the Bagatelle, the maison de plaisance of Charles Philippe compte D’Artois, the king’s brother.43

In the gardens at Versailles, in 1777, Robert created a new tableau for Girardon’s group of sculptures Bains d’Apolon. Following the decision to cut down the old and create the new royal garden in 1774, he produced paintings which represent tree planting at the Versailles, exhibited at the Salon of 1777.44 In 1778 d’Angiviller bestowed upon Robert the title of Dessinateur des Jardins du Roi, which had not been in use after the death of André Le Nôtre. He made painted and garden decorations for members of the highest aristocracy, which we will discuss later. A painter and a designer of gardens is an artistic hy-brid typical of the 18th century but it was Robert’s drifting between the worlds of twodimensional and tridimensional illusionism that his contemporaries judged as most elegant and most successful.

Upon the establishing of the committee for approval of projects for reg-ulation of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in 1778, Robert became one of

40 D’Angiviller was a steadfast, hard working beurocrat, who took his duties as minister very seriously. He maintained close relations with a number of philosоphes. He shared Diderot’s concept of public function of art and believed in public art under control of the crown, guided by interests of the monarchy. He was dedicated to the study of classical antiquarianism: J. de Cayeux, C. De Boulot, op. cit, 309-310.

41 On that in: S. C. Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty, Princeton 1983; S. Kettering, Gift-Giving and Patronage in Early Modern France, French History 2 (1988), 131-151.

42 Under inluenced of Louis XVI, as well as under the previous king, the court would periodically leave Versailles and move to the royal chateaux for vacationing, hunting or other pleasures. The annual visits to Fontainebleu were the most popular. One contemporary wrote that “eve-ryone knows that the court never shines so brightly as in Fontainebleu“. In the days of Louis XVI court ceremonial looses much of its reputation: magnificentia, the old, pre-encyclopaedic form, was definitely démodé, even in royal palaces, which was decisive for Robert’s decoration. On that in: P. R. Radisich, op. cit., 97-116.

43 Maison de plaisance is a place liberated of the limitations of court or city life, within easy reach from the capital. Like the salons, the petites maisons were mixed social zones, places of meet-ing of the high aristocracy and the bourgeoisie. As a result of a wager between the youngest brother of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Bagatelle was built in just 65 days in 1777, and the entire interior was created in that time span, too. Today, Robert’s paintings are found in the Metropoliten Musem in New York: J. Baillio, op. cit., 149-182; P. R. Radisich, op. cit., 78-96.

44 On L’entrée du tapis vert lors de l’abattage des arbres du parc de Versailles Robert also painted the young royal couple, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. On Robert’s paintings representing the planting of trees in the garden of Versailles: J. De Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, 15-19; P. R. Radisich, The King Prunes His Garden: Hubert Robert’s Picture of the Versailles Garden in 1775, Eighteenth-Century Studies 21/4 (1988), 454 -471.

art, as much as on the prices on the art market, was one of the places which contributed to that phenomenon. At a time when auction houses challenged as rivals the Royal Academy and its biannual exhibitions – the Salons, and deals were an unavoidable instance in the procuring assessment and verifica-tion of works of art, the artists, including Robert, devoted themselves to the market.35 One of the most significant patrons of the epoch, count de Cay-lus, commissioned from Robert morceaux curieux à Rome in 1760 which he intended to publish. This commission, which was never completed, was en-visaged for the broader public. According to Mariette, himself a participant of lundis, Robert produced a great number of paintings and drawings with Italian motifs, “finer“ than paintings, which were very highly regarded and sought after.36 At the time, the commercial transactions of the Parsian société were regarded as a civilised activity, based on rationalist striving for progress. As a result, many of the artists, including Robert, became professionally in-dependent. The commercial success of paintings such as the Park on the Lake from Belgrade conferred upon Robert the assets which no artist could possess in earlier times – an art collection, a country house, house servants.

For madame Geofrin Robert produced petit tableaux, paintings which could be defined as conversation pieces.37 Soon after he displayed his accom-plishment in the domain of cartography with the prospects he made for the Salle des Ētats in the archbishop’s palace at Rouen.38 For the king’s ministers he produced presentations of the construction of roads, bridges, tunnels, which expressed the energy and the status of the modern state.39

Robert was most respect as a painter of ruins, which we will discuss in de-tail further in the text. At this point we should, however, point out that it was precisely the paintings of ruins produced by Robert des Ruines which inspired Diderot’s regard for the artist’s opus. Because they encompassed historicism and genre, such paintings of Robert were an embodiment of Diderot’s doc-trine on moral art.

35 The dealer becomes more dominant than the connoiseur of old times, dedicated to collecting the Italian masters: K. Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800, Cam-bridge 1990, 153-168; C. Jones, Bourgeois Revolution Revivified: 1789 and Social Change, u: Re-writing the French Revolution, C. Lucas ed., Oxford 1991, 110.

36 Abecedario de P. J. Mariette, vol. IV, 312, 414.37 The popularity of cabinet picture of Dutch and Flemish art of the 17th century affects the de-

velopment of the so-called conversation pieces in the 18th century. This type of painting rep-resented people in their homes, their intimate and private surroundings, and defined identity through the relations between people, their possesions and their milieu. That new form had the typical characteristics of genre and the particularities of portrait: M. Praz, Conversation Piece: A Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America, London 1971, 33; R. Paulson, Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge 1975, 121-136. On Robert’s paintings made for madame Geofrin: P. R. Radisich, Hubert Robert. Painted Spaces of the Enlightenment, Cambridge Univ. Pr. 1998, 15-54.

38 On this decoration created in 1773 and commissioned by the archbishop of Rouen, cardinal La Rochefoucauld, in: P. R. Radisich, op. cit., 54-63.

39 Robert’s pictures of roads, bridges, canals, as instruments of political communication, are an expression of contemporary stance on national states in creation: M. Craske, Art in Europe 1700-1830, Oxford 1997, 261-262.


Guiard.51 His personality was most precisely represented by Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun on a portrait exhibited at the Sa-lon of 1789. In representing “Robert, a landscape artist, in his own right“, Vigée LeBrun presents him as an agitated man, holding his palette and brushes, thus making a refer-ence to the iconography of “inspired genius“ (fig. 3).52 The stance of the figure, the posi-tion of the hands, the unruly hair and the turn of the head are a paraphrase of the ma-trix, the so-called portraits de fantasie, created some twenty years earlier by Fragonard, Robert’s friend and colleague from Rome, as a mixture of portrait conventions, with striking sprezzatura, light, open, broad brush strokes.53 Robert’s portrait expresses his identity, meticulously constructed in concordance with the norms of the day and the fame in which he basked.

Robert’s portrait is also found among the portraits à la plume in the mem-oires of Vigée LeBrun. She points out that of all the artists she knew Robert was the one most active in society and the one who most enjoyed playing the social field.54 She described his wreckless daring in the Colosseum which made “ones hair stand on end“ and quoted from L’imagination, a poem by Jacques Delille, which presented Robert’s adventures in the catacombs of Rome which he roamed, lost, for three days. She noted that Robert enter-tained company with his imitations of the acrobats from commedia dell’arte.

Robert, who represented himself on The Artist in His Studio (fig. 8), was very fond of self representation. He also appears on the Park on the Lake from

51 P. Grate, H. Robert et l’iconographie d’Augustin Pajou, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 106 (1989), 7-13.52 Robert’s portrait, as well as the self portrait of Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun with her daughter, were

displayed as a pair at the Salon; they were, thus, purchased as a pair for a large sum of money by the banker Laborde; they were thus described upon the sale of his possesions. In the 18th century paintings often came in Pairs, constructed after the principle of balance or contrast. Following her return to France, Vigée LeBrun kept both portraits to her death. According to her wish, they were handed over to the Louvre with a note that they must remain a pair: P. R. Radisich, Que peut définir les femmes?: Vigee-Lebrun Portraits of an Artist, Eighteenthe-Century Studies 25/4 (1992), 441-467, 466.

53 M. Sheriff, Fragonard. Art and Eroticism, Chicago, London 1990, 5.54 E. L. Vigée Le Brun, Souvenirs, Paris 1835-1837, II, 308. On social involvement of contemporary

artists: J. Owens Schaefer, The Souvenirs of Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun: The Self-Imaging of the Art-ist and the Woman, International Journal of Women’s Studies 4 (1981), 35-49; T. E. Crow, Paint-ers and Public Life in 18th Century, New Haven, London 1987.

its members.45 That same year, by decree of d’Angiviller, he was promoted as Gardien of the royal gallery. He gained the position of advisor at the Acad-emy and, together with Joseph Maria Vien and Hugues Taraval, made the first inventory of paintings in the Louvre.

Fame. Honnête homme

In the words of his day, Robert was famous and one of the specific character-istics of Paris on the eve of the Revolution was precisely the fame of its artists: “Talent, wittiness, charm and artistic fame drew flattering praise. Those ex-ceptional gifts of nature placed a man lacking noble birth in the same position as the highest aristocracy“.46 Robert was one of those who possesed “cultural capital“, formed tastes and directed fashion.47 Because his persona was present on the public scene, it shared in its deep transformations and was the subject of interpretation of his contemporaries. In a broad sense, those interpreta-tions can be associated with the contemporary creation of the theory of per-sonal identity.48

Robert was a veritable product of salon culture with its bonds between aristo-cratic and bourgeoisie ambitions, one which shaped a sort of “technology of the self “, i.e. the ideal of honnête homme.49 An honnête homme could come from any social milieu, but his self-formation had to be in the spirit of noble civilité. Robert was a typical “conceptual artefact“ of his age: he was popular for his “charming conversation and cultured wittiness, exceptional character and cultured clever-ness which got him into the best circles of Rome and Paris“. His presence “was a pleasure for company and his painting bien inventée.“50 He enjoyed the reputation of an exceptionally urbane and refined man. He moved with ease from one job to the next, from genre to the other. He was a model for a number of portrait painters: Augustin Pajou (fig. 7), P. A. Hall, Jean Baptiste Isabey, Adélaide Labille-

45 On that in: É. Pommier, Le projet du Musée royal (1747-1789), у: T. W. Gaehtgens, L’art et les normes sociales au XVIIIe siècle, Paris 2001, 185-210.

46 Gabriel Sénac de Meilhan, Le Gouvernement, les moeurs et les conditions en France avant la révolution, Poulet-Malaiss, Paris 1795, 121, el. edit.

47 P. Bourdieu, Distinction. A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Cambridge Mass, 1984, 18-96.

48 The 18th century is an epoch of expressed transformation of the ways of perception of the self and personal identity. That metamorphosis begins in Britain with Lock, but German and French intellectuals, especially Diderot and Rousseau, give it special quality. Regardless of their differences, they all perceive the self as a dynamic and natural system subjected to the laws of growth and development and no longer as a non-material substance: R. Martin, J. Barresi, Introduction, u: Naturalization of the Soul. Self and Personal Identity in the Eighteenth Century, London, New York 2000, 1-11.

49 The honnête concept is very broad and can not be the subject of literal translation. It implies the ideal of self-perfecting, for, apart from the virtues of the heart, the honnête homme must also posses virtues tied to social behaviour: M. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century, New York 2002, 13-25.

50 Mémoires secrets de Bachaumont de 1762 à 1787, J. A. D. Ravenel, F. P. De Mairobert, M. D’An-gerville eds., Paris 1830, 58.

7. Augustin Pajou, Hu-bert Robert, sculpture, marble 1780, Ecole Nationale Supérieurе des Beaux-Arts


– won the artist huge success. However, in time, his extravagant life and art style began to draw negative assessment. For Denis Didrot, who published art critiques in Correspondance Literaire, art, ideological construction, had to be public. The Salon was not only an example for the students, it was also a medium of public opinion. Four years after his excitement with Robert’s Grand Gallery of the Louvre, at the Salon of 1771 Diderot wrote: “Should this artist (Robert) continue to treat form so coarsely and sketchy, he will loose the capacity to finish... He wants to make his ten pieces of silver before lunch; he is a braggart, his wife is a fashion fiend, thus he must create in a hurry... Born to be great, he shall remain mediocre.“56 Too “sketchy“, incapable of finishing his paintings, fastueux, preoccupied by desire to make money to satisfy the re-quests of his élégante wife, for Diderot Robert was an example of la vie privée, a phenomenon which, contrary to the habit of the first half of the century, was now seen with a highly critical eye, in particular because it was inextricably connected with the luxe.

In the 18th century luxury was far more stronger as a social phenomenon than ever before.57 For the first time in European history it was regarded as a stimulus of progress. Luxury goods, enjoyed also by Robert, were a significant component of urban society and the essence of self representation. However, as the century drew to its close, most of all as a result of the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau, luxury came to be regarded as a force of destructive ef-fect on the natural state of the self.58 Robert’s identity which was fashioned by luxury irritated Diderot and other critics. William Beckford, who visited Robert in 1784, described him as a worker resembling a spider.59

Diderot blamed Robert’s overproduction of paintings on his fashionable wife. Contempt for the feminine gender, which becomes an epitome of the capricious, fashionable and commercial, is a topos of French literature of the day.60 The construction of identity through clothes, for which, it was believed, women were responsible, is strongly criticised.61 The culture of presentation, carefully nurtured throughout the previous decades, was not viewed with an unkind eye. For Diderot, who believed art was an ideological construct of public character, Robert, altogether, became frivolous.

56 Si cet artiste continue á esquisser, il perdra l’habitude de finir; sa tête et sa main deviendront libertines. Il ébauche jeune, que fera t’il d’once lorsqu’il vieillira? Il veut gagner ses dix louis dans la matinée; il este fastueux, sa femme este une élégante, il faut faire vite; mais on perd son talent, et né pour être grand, on reste médiocre. Finissez, Monsieur Robert; prenez l’habitude de finir, Monsieur Robert, et quand vous l’aurez prise, Monsieur Robert, il ne vous en coûtera presque pas plus pour faire un tableau qu’une esquisse: Salon de 1771, Salons de Diderot, J. Seznec, J. Adhe-mar eds., Oxford 1957-1967, 4:189.

57 On the culture of luxury as an 18th century cultural phenomenon: Luxury in the Eighteenth Century. Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, M. Berg, E. Eger eds., New York 2003.

58 L. Fontaine, The Circulation of Luxury Goods in Eighteenth-Century Paris: Social Redistribution and an Alternative Currency, у: Luxury in the Eighteenth Century, 89-102.

59 On the aversion for the desire of artist to earn money: R. Wrigley, op. cit., 132.60 J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, Ithaca 1988.61 On that in: D. Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion in the Ancien Régime, Cam-

bridge 1994; J. M. Jones, Sexing La Mode. Gender, Fashion and Commercial Culture in Old Regime France, Oxford, New York 2004.

Belgrade (fig. 2), to which we shall return later. The manner Robert is present-ed in on his own paintings, as well as on his portrait painted by Vigée LeBrun, was appropriate also because of the extreme facilité of its execution – swift, sketch like manner of painting characteristic also of the paintings from the National Museum in Belgrade. Facilité is a term used in academic discourse to describe intentional, obvious easy creation. It had both a positive and a negative meaning. Vigée LeBrun wrote that Robert possesed “an exceptional ease which some would call luck and some a curse“ – he painted quickly, as if he were writing a letter; at times when he managed to control that ease, his paintings were perfect; he was susceptible to heightened states of inspiration, which threatened to destroy his talent. Others also noted Robert’s incapability to “control“ and finish his paintings, which “look lake giant sketches of win-ning colour and pleasant impression.“55

Qualities which characterize Robert’s paintings, including those from the National Museum in Belgrade – picturesque charm inspired by an integration of nature and structures from times past, easy and swift brush strokes, sugges-tive and poetic forms which awaken in the beholder sensitive capacities and invite him to “finish“ and round off the painting with his own interpretations

55 Examen au Salon de l’année 1779, after: J. Baillio, op. cit., 172.

8. Hubert Robert, The artist in his studio, 1763-1765, oil on canvas, Museum Boij-mans Van Benningen, Rotterdam, © Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

B I O G R A P H Y • 29

Revolution, accusation, rehabilitation

Diderot’s negative opinions did not deter Robert’s career but they did herald a time in which the artist would loose his halo of fame. That was the time of the Revolution, the most astonishing event, “a monstrous scene which drew to-gether opposing passions – pleasure and disgust, laughter and tears, fear and hope.“62 The sublime, the aesthetics with which Robert’s age was preoccupied, became an everyday reality. Like the architects Claude Nicholas Ledoux and François-Joseph Bélanger, Robert was imprisioned in 1793, at the time of La Terreur. The artist who depicted revolutionary events of the 13th and 14th of July, 1789, Robert spent ten months in jail because he had not updated his carte de civisme and had, therefore, become “suspicious“. In the course of his incarcertion he painted on cloths from which food was distributed as well as on plates (fig. 9).63 Re was released from prison on August 4th, 1794 (17 Ther-midor An II), after the fall of Robespierre.

Shortly after he returned to public life. Although he was not a member of the commission founded in 1792 on the event of declaring the Louvre a national museum, in 1795 he joined this official body and, subsequentlym also became the president of the newly formed Conservatoire du Muséum, which would remain active until 1797 when it was replaced by the Conseil de direction, in the activities of which Robert also took part. The Grand Gallery of the Louvre was fully opened to the public on July 14th, 1800. Because of the decree which at that time forbade the existence of artists’ studios at the mu-seum, Robert had to move to Rue Neuve des Mathurins, where he remained until his death in 1808. The pension which he had been awarded long since by d’Angiviller was never revoked.

Because of his powerful patrons from France and abroad, the great opus of Robert is kept in museums and private collections throughout the world.64 The largest collections are to be found in the Louvre and the Hermitage, while the Museum of Vallance has a considerable collection of Robert’s drawings. A great number of Robert’s works was catalogued after the artist’s death in 1808, when an inventory was made of his studio, as well as after the death of his wife in 1821.65 Many of his works appeared on the art marker of Paris.

62 E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1793), New York 1973, 21-22.63 On Robert’s works created in prisons Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare: P. R. Radisich, Hubert

Robert. Painted Spaces of the Enlightenment, 117-129.64 Robert received great commissions from Russia, most of all on account of count Stroganoff

whom he met in Rome and who became one of the leading men of the Academy at Saint Petersburg and at the court of Empress Catherine II. The Empress and her son, like other rep-resentatives of aristocratic circles, the Yousoupoff family in particular, commissioned Robert’s paintings for their palaces. Robert’s landscapes from the Yousoupoff family collection were, most probably, pictural prototypes for Derzhavin’s famous Ruins. On that: L. Golburt, Der-zhavin’s Ruins and the Birth of Historical Elegy, Slavic Review 65/4 (2006), 670-693. Some of Robert’s paintings are still in situ, in the Pavlovsk palace or on the Archangelsko estate: J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert, in: Dictionary of Art, Vol. IV, 449.

65 С. Gabillot, op. cit., 258.

9. Hubert Robert, Le ravitaillement des prisonniers a Saint-Lazare, 1794, oil on canvas, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet

The Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola

THE PAINTING ENTITLED Staircase of the Park of the Farnese Palace at Caprarola (fig. 1, oil on canvas 218 x 149 cm) was registered as The Park of the Villa d’Este in museum documents. By its dimensions, manner of execution and theme it belongs to the type of grand decorative compositions. It shows a view of a garden and a monumental staircase of an Italian villa – identified in the documents based on which it was admitted to the Museum as the Villa d’Este, and that designation was kept in all subsequent museum documents.1 Under that name Robert’s work was exhibited in the permanent collection2 and presented in museum publications.3 In foreign publications this painting was identified as View of the Garden at Caprarola,4 Palazzo Massimo,5 Pic-turesque view of the Gardens of Caprarola,6 Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola.7

On grounds of an intertwining of real and fictitious architectural and ele-ments of landscape, and a lack of intention to show the actual appearance of the place, this composition, like much of Robert’s opus, can be classified as a 1 Archive of Yugoslavia: 54-319-483: Museum of Art, no. 501 of 2.VII 1949.2 It was exhibited in the permanent collection from 1966 until March, 1996, when the entire col-

lection of European Art was withdrawn because of the theft of the Bather by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and assessment of lack of security measures as well as microclimatic conditions for the exhibiting of art works.

3 К. Ambrozić, in: Narodni muzej Beograd, Beоgrad 1983, 159.4 P. Rémy, C. F. Julliot, Catalogue des tableaux & dessins précieux des maitres célèbres des trois

écoles, Figures des marbres, de bronze&de terre cuite, Estampes an feuilles&autres objets du Cabinet de feu M. Randon de Boisset, Receveur Générale, par Pierre Rémy: Le Vente se sera le Jeudi 27 Février 1777, à trois heures et demie précises de relevée, rue des Capucines, près la Place Vendôme, 1777: 103, cat. no. 217. Should the information given in the Catalogue of sale of the collection of Randon de Boisset under the numeration of 217 refer to the painting from the National Museum.

5 J. de Cailleux, Robert a pris modèle sur Boucher, Connaissance des Arts 32 (Octobrе 1959), 100-106, 105. Further in this text, the last name of one of the most significant scholars of Robert’s opus, Jean Cayeux, shall be referred to as either Cailleux or Cayeux, depending on the manner in which his texts and books are signed. In either case, it refers to the same person and two different ways of writing the same name.

6 А. Ananoff, François Boucher: Peintures, vol II, La Bibliothèque des Arts, Lausanne 1976, 327. The author published a photograph of the work of art of the location of which he had no knowledge. It is, in fact, the painting from the National Museum. With it he cited first the list of works from the collection of Randon de Boisset which were on sale followed by a list from an anonymous sale from 1784, where, along with three other paintings, there is mention of one by Hubert Robert under the name Une vue pittoresque des jardins de Caprarola (Vente anonyme 14 -16 avril 1784).

7 Ј. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, Paris 1987, 54, fig. 40. The dimensions of the painting are determined as 246 х 158cm, and the painting itself marked as missing.

32 • I m a g i n a r y G a r d e n s o f H u b e r t R o b e r t T h e S t a i r c a s e o f t h e Pa r k o f Pa l a z z o Fa r n e s e a t C a p r a r o l a • 3 3

11).10 One of the most representative examples, as all those who studied this segment of Robert’s work agree, is precisely this painting.11

Further investigation and analysis enabled a reconstruction of the history of the painting all the way up to its epilogue in the collection of the National Museum, so far mostly unknown, and certainly unpublished and thus hidden from the view of western researchers and art historians. Thus, as a result of research triggered by a reassessment of claims presented in existing bibliogra-phy that the painting was mad at the close of the 1860’s as a result of coopera-tion between the young Hubert Robert and François Boucher (1703-1770), who, at that time, was the king’s premier peintre.

10 J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, 31, fig. 16. Another example of a representation of the park of Caprarola with a fountain, although without a staircase, is Robert’s painting Fan-tasy Inspired by the Villa Farnese, ink drawing with water color, 34х21cm, signed and dated: H. Robert 1760. It was once a part of the collection of the Goncourt brothers, and is today in another private collection (fig. 10). A different type of representation can be seen on a pre-paratory drawing for a painting exhibited at the Salon in 1775 under the title of Grand Stair-case, pencil and water color, 32х44,9 cm, Art Museum, Huston, with a double semi-circular staircase like the one on the painting from the National Museum. In place of the fountain, the niche is occupied by a seated female figure with a raised right arm (fig. 11). As opposed to our painting, the villa Farnese appears in the background. The semi-circular staircase and the fountain appear on a large number of Robert’s drawings, but the other architectural elements are different and can not be associated with the villa Farnese and the Caprarola park.

11 Our research of this question was largely encouraged by Mr. Pierre Rosenberg, long term direc-tor of the Louvre, upon his visit to the National Museum in 2003. In the correspondence which ensued, he introduced us to the texts of Cayeux and Ananoff, which were the basis of this work, for which we are most grateful and would like to take this opportunity to thank him most kindly.

representative of the iconographic type of veduta di fantasia. Robert owed his stylistic and iconographic solutions to Roman tradition which knew of four basic types of architectural representations: veduta ideale, veduta di fantasia, prospettivа and rovinismo.8 Robert’s capricci were close to all those forms and were very much like one another. Still, he was considered the most significant French representative of veduta di fantasia art. This type of image represents a combination of real and fantastic architectural structures and urban spaces.

Although his work from the National Museum does not belong to this type of picture, the name of this painting can be defined more precisely as the Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola. The twin-sided semi-circular staircase with a fountain placed in a niche under an arcade, wherefrom water flows in two superimposed streams into a circular basin at the bottom, corresponds to the exterior outlook of Giacomо da Vignola’s staircase of the Villa Farnese at Caprarola,9 as represented in sev-eral instances by Robert on the sketches he made during his years of study in Italy and later, also, upon his return to France. Robert visited Caprarola in 1761 and 1764. At that time he made a great number of sketches, draw-ings and paintings depicting the garden and the Villa Farnese, destroyed with the passing of time. The key ele-ment of topographic identification is the semi-circular staircase, while the inner part of the niche is treated in several different ways on Robert’s veduttas: occupied by either a fountain, assuming the same location as on the painting from the National Museum (corresponding to the actual position), or a sculpture, as on some of his drawings. Upon his return to Paris, Robert mostly relied on three different interpretations of the architectural ele-ments and decoration of the great niche place between the two wings of the semi-circular staircase (figs. 10,

8 Veduta ideale is a representation of actual places and famous buildings, freely arranged, usual-ly created for the voyagers on Grand tour; рrospettivа is a decorative illusionistic architectural perspective of urban exteriors and interiors with theatre effect; rovinismo is the representation of ruins. On that: L. Salerno, I pittori di vedute in Italia, 1580-1830, Roma 1991.

9 The villa and the gardens at Caprarola were raised by the cardinal Alessandro Farnese, grand-son of Pope Paul III, who employed Vignola from 1559 to 1573 as the ultimate designer. Gar-dens with fountains, a nympheum, grotto, Casino del piacere with catena d’acqua were held in particularly high esteem. During the first decades of the 17th century, cardinal Odoadro Farnese enjoyed his hortus delicarium. After him, Caprarola gradually fell into disrepair: М. Agnelli, Gardens of the Italian Villas, London 1987, 56-60.

10. Hubert Robert, Fantasy inspired by Villa Farnese, 1760, ink and wash, private collection

11. Hubert Robert, The Large Staircase, 1761-65, ink and wash, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston


Two hypotheses regarding the production of the painting emerged from data recorded in documents and published in existing bibliography on the subject. Both date the painting to the period around the early 1870’s. That was a time of greatest expansion in the artistic career and social life of Hubert Robert which gave him the status of one of the central figures of the art scene and cultural life in France.

The painting Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola was not in the possession of the artist, nor of his wife. Judging by the available docu-ments, it could have found its way to the art market even in Robert’s lifetime.

Painters and patrons

A special problem related to the identification of Robert’s paintings and de-termining their history is the similarity of motifs and names of many of his works. Moreover, in older catalogues technical data is often missing or unreli-able. There is, however, one group of paintings is mentioned in documents and bibliography as resulting from the co-production of Robert and Boucher. Boucher is mentioned exclusively as the painter of figures. Opinions differ on the question of whether or not Boucher actually participated as a painter of figures on Robert’s canvases. Such a listing of paintings as co-productions of Robert and Boucher is helpful in making a distinction between them and other works by Robert with similar imagery and names and enables their eas-ier identification in older bibliography. One must be aware of the fact that the authors who were dealing with this problem had no direct insight into those works, and bear in mind that, in time, all trace of them was lost.12 Apart from photographs made before World War II, showing the painting from the Na-tional Museum (the location of which was also unknown to researchers, they even proposed the possibility that it had been destroyed), all other works from this group of paintings were completely inaccessible to later scholars (fig. 12). It is possible that the only preserved painting from this category is precisely the one from the National Museum.

This entire group of paintings is first mentioned in the Catalogue of the Collection of Randon de Boisset, put together on the occasion of its selling held on February 27th, 1777, where a total of nine paintings made by Robert is registered under six inventory entries, and of which six display figures painted by Boucher.13 Catalogue number 217 refers to “two paintings of great value: one showing the appearance of the gardens at Caprarola , the other the grave

12 J. de Cailleux, Robert a pris modèle sur Boucher, 100-106; А. Ananoff, op. cit., 327; Ј. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, 54 -55.

13 P. Rémy, C. F. Julliot, Catalogue des tableaux & dessins précieux des maitres célèbres des trois écoles, Figures des marbres, de bronze&de terre cuite, Estampes an feuilles&autres objets du Cabinet de feu M. Randon de Boisset, Receveur Générale, par Pierre Rémy: Le Vente se sera le Jeudi 27 Février 1777, à trois heures et demie précises de relevée, rue des Capucines, près la Place Vendôme, cat. no. 217-222. Along with that, under cat. no. 188-201 there is a list of 18 paintings by Boucher, followed by 55 framed drawings, as well as 34 drawings on paper by the same author.

12. Photograph of the paint-ing Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola made before World War II


Flanders and Holland in 1766. Boucher introduced de Boisset to Remi, who advised him on questions regarding the formation of his collection and was, also, one of the authors of the catalogue of the same collection.17

In view of these facts, information listed in the catalogue can be regarded as reliable to a great extent, in particular regarding the paintings which, ac-cording to the catalogue, were produced in co-operation of Hubert Robert and Francoise Boucher. As opposed to that, one of the foremost experts on Robert’s work, Jean Cayeux, was of the opinion that these were Robert’s works alone: the figures were not Boucher’s, they were simply adopted from his paintings. Cayeux explains the claims made in the catalogue of de Boisset’s collection by the fact that Boucher was more famous of the two, especially at the moment the catalogue was put together, and that the inclusion of the name of the first painter of the king only raised the price of the works included in the collection.18 In analyzing the reasons which could have brought about this sort of co-opertion between the established Boucher and the young Rob-ert, Cayeux assumes that reasons related to Boucher’s seriously deteriorating health, as of 1762, and his utterly poor condition which even prevented him from exhibiting at the Salon in 1767 may have stood behind this connection.

Jean Cayeux mentions four other paintings of large dimensions (2.90 х 1.53 m) which were sold on March 9th, 1868, and which the expert Eugène Féral presented as joint works of Robert and Boucher. They comprised an ensemble including two compositions of the same height but greater width (2.90 х 2.45), one of which was dated by Robert himself in 1773, i.e. three years prior to Boucher’s death. Cayeux relied on this as argument of the unre-liability of data on the paintings which are mentioned as the joint work of two artists. He then analyses the painting he calls View of the Staircase of the Park of the Villa Massimo in Rome (2.18 х 1.50 m), on which the figures appear to be undeniably the work of Boucher. Cayeux had no knowledge of the location of this work of Robert’s, the subject of which was wrongly identified as the villa Massimo – this, in fact, is the staircase of the park of the villa Farnese and the painting from the National Museum in Belgrade.19

Based on an album of prints of drawings from the collection of Georges Ryaux, especially the two drawings which are a literal study for the staircase of the “villa Massimo“, Cayeux proves in his text that Robert used Boucher’s figures as models. These are in fact prints of drawings and, in view of the re-versed position of the figures represented on them, one can conclude that on the original drawings the figures were represented in the same positions as on the painting. One folio (Fol. 51 D.52) shows a male figure from the back, with a staff on his shoulders and a donkey by his side, and a woman holding a child

17 Ibid., Х.18 J. de Cailleux, Robert a pris modèle sur Boucher, 102.19 Ibid., 103. Cayeux had no knowledge of the location of the painting, the photograph of which

he published in the text, even several decades later when he published the same photograph again in his book Hubert Robert et les jardins (v. supra) where he states his assumption that the painting had probably been in Germany and destroyed in bombing raids in the course of World War II.

of Sextius and a vase from the Borghese gardens; the figures gracing these paintings were painted by Francoise Boucher; height 7 feet 2 thumbs, on can-vas, 4 feet 9 thumbs in width“ (fig. 13).14 All six paintings on which, according to the catalogue, the figures were painted by Boucher (cat. nos. 217-219) share the same dimensions which, converted into the metric system, equal 2.18 x 1.55 m. The remaining three (cat. nos. 220-222) are smaller in size. Robert, it is noted, painted the landscape and the figures on the first,15 and this is prob-ably true of the other two of the same group as well, considering the fact that there is no explicit mention of cooperation with any other artist.

In the foreword to the catalogue of de Boisset’s collection, written by M. de Sireuil, connoisseur and amateur of painting, friend of the collector, the author notes that this was one of Europe’s most beautiful cabinets with most valuable and best preserved works collected by a man of high culture and high position, that of Receveur général des finances. Together with an excellent library, a collection of paintings of Flemish, Dutch and Italian artists, in de Sireuil’s opinion, it was the works of French painters which gave de Boisset’s

collection its special quality: “M. de Boisset was particularly inclined towards monsieurs Boucher, Greuze and Robert, and the very listing of their names is already a praise“.16 The text mentions de Boisset’s and Boucher’s travels to 14 Ibid., 103: No 217: Deux tableaux d’un grand méritе, l’un représente une vue prise dans les jardins de

Caprarole,l’autre le tombeau de Sеxtius & le vase des jardins Borghese; les figures qui les enrichissent font de François Boucher; hauteur 7 pieds 2 pouces, largeur 4 pieds 9 pouces, sur toile.

15 Ibid., 103: No 20: …Paysage & fugures par M. Robert…16 Ibid., Avertissement: …M de Boisset fut partuculiérement lié avec MM Boucher, Greuze &

Robert leur nom seul est un éloge...

13. Pages from the Sales catalog of the Randon de Boisset’s Collection 1777, with Hubert Robert’s paintings


by the hand and helping it descend the stairs. The other print (Fol. 52 D.53) shows a group of wash women which appears in the front plane on the paint-ing, in front of a fountain, with a certain variation in the position of the dog.20 Dresses with high underskirts and turbans on the heads of women shown in profile are typical of Boucher but the drawings are Robert’s which, in Cayeux’s opinion, brings on the conclusion that the figures on the painting were also painted by Robert, in emulation of Boucher. He identified the archetype of the composition with the wash women on a drawing which appeared at the sale of the collection of Henry-Michel Lévy, traced in pen over a drawing in pencil. Two women washing the laundry on the river are represented in positions almost identical to those in Robert’s album and on our painting. The drawing is signed by Robert and there is an inscription confirming that the drawing was made “after nature in Charanton“.21 For the figures of the woman and the child descending the stairs (fig. 14) a parallel is found on Robert’s paint-ing entitled Cascade from the Cayeux collection and the model on Boucher’s composition Return from the Market from the Cognac collection. Based on this evidence and numerous examples with which he illustrated the method of Robert’s work, Cayeux concluded that the paintings were in all probability painted by Robert and not Boucher.22

Although the validity of Cayeux’s hypothesis that Robert sought to grasp Boucher’s method of work, as attested by a number of drawings once consid-ered to be the work of Boucher and later confirmed as the work of Robert, 23 is beyond reservation, it is absolutely certain that the two artists did collaborate closely between 1765 and 1770. Artistic collaboration was the usual norm of the epoch, as attested by a number of examples, and Boucher’s and Robert’s joint works have been mentioned a number of times in different sources we have already mentioned. The attribution of Robert’s works is still a challenge, considering the fact many of them are “hybrids“ of a sort which are hard to define.24 Because the ageing Boucher did not paint monumental compositions due to his failing health, he was able to paint the figures on the canvases of his younger colleague. The patron of the painting could have commissioned from

20 Ibid., 103. Considering the fact that the author of the text refers to pages from an album and prints of drawings from a private collection, which were not reproduced in the text, we can only quote his opinion, at the moment without the possibility of making a comparison. The so-called Album Ryaux with drawings by Boucher, Robert and Ango changed owners at an auction at Christie’s held in New York in January 1996. Robert’s drawings showing the figures which appear on the painting from the National Museum are listed under the numbers 12 and 26.

21 Ibid., 104.22 Cayeux explains Robert’s process of creation and treatment of Boucher’s figure using the ex-

ample of the painting entitled View of the Cascades and Temple at Tivoli from the Derval col-lection which was exhibited at the Salon in 1773, and based on Boucher’s drawing kept today at the Museum of Besancon, as well as on a number of other drawings by both artists.

23 Ibid., 105.24 This is particularly true of the Roman works of Robert, Fragonard and Ango. Although the

exhibition held in 1990-1991 at the Villa Medici in Rome summed up knowledge to date on the work of these artists in Rome (Roma 1990), the attribution of their paintings is still not entirely completed: V. Carlson, Hubert Robert in Rome: Some Pen-and-Wash Drawings, Mas-ter Drawings 39/3 (2001), 288-299.

14. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, detail


Robert, a virtuoso in representing architecture, the composition but not of the pertaining figures – for, in the words of Diderot’s critiques, they were con-sidered his weak point. Likewise, he could have asked Boucher, a celebrated master of representing the body in movement, to paint the figures. Such a collaboration was in harmony with the spirit of the times which did not insist on sovereign authorship of a work of art. Should the patron of the painting be identified as Boucher’s friend, de Boisset, as suggested by Cayeux, such a condition must have been accepted on the part of both artists. Should the painting have been created as part of the decoration of some representative space, which, considering its overall quality, is highly probable, a collabora-tion between the artists would have been accepted without questioning, pri-marily for practical reasons.

According to Cayeux, the painting must have been finished before 1777, the year of the sale of de Boisset’s collection, and the drawing from the Mu-seum at Valance showing an identical group of figures of washer women and signed with the year 1774 could indicate the approximate date of creation of this painting (fig. 15).

Cayeux retained his opinion of Robert’s method and ways of painting fig-ures even many years later, after he had analyzed and published the painting under the name of Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, stat-ing, again, that it was commissioned by de Boisset and that all trace of it was lost following the sale organized by Le Brun in 1784.25

Cayeux’s argumentation was not accepted by all scholars of Boucher’s and Robert’s work. In the monograph and critical catalogue of Boucher’s works published by Alexander Ananoff, so far the most complete, this painting is designated as the most representative example of collaboration of the two art-ists.26 Ananoff emphasizes that the “personages were painted by the hand of Francoise Boucher“.27 Ananoff, too, had only an old photograph of the paint-ing and knew nothing of its current location. In view of the fact that neither of these authors had direct contact with this work of art, they could not have had more knowledge of all the relevant data tied to its history.

What is most significant for that history, and could not have been deter-mined without immediate insight and study of the front and back sides of the painting itself, is the inscription on the key stretcher: M. Léopold Goldschmidt

25 J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, 54, 146. Here, too, the author published the old pho-tograph of “the most monumental of all representations of the garden of the Villa Farnese“ (referring to the painting from the National Museum in Belgrade), but provides incorrect dimensions (246 х 158 cm). A precise conversion of the measures given in inches in the cata-logue of de Boisset’s collection (height 7 feet, 2 thumbs, width 4 feet, 9 thumbs) equals the dimensions of 218 х 145 cm, which comes very close to the measures of the painting from the National Museum (218 х 149 cm). Minor discrepancies in dimensions are logical, considering the the rentolage of the painting and its setting on the key stretcher.

26 А. Ananoff, op. cit., 327, fig. 1797.27 Ananoff quoted Cayeux’s text, but was explicit in stating a different opinion regarding the

cooperation of the two artists on the production of the painting: …Nous tenons à souligner que les personnages sont de la main de François Boucher...

15. Hubert Robert, Les Lavandières à Charenton, 1774, pen, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’archéologie de Valence


schmidt – to which some admirable groups of figures were added by Boucher...30 This text was written while the painting was still a part of the Goldschmidt collection. From it we can conclude that at the end of the 19th century it was still regarded as a joint work of Robert and Boucher and as one of the four compositions intended for La Muette (fig. 18).

Dilke does not indicate the source of such claims. La Muette palace, lo-cated in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, was renovated under Louis XV and Francoise Boucher took part in its decoration, in particular in the production of the tapestries. After her arrival to France in 1770, Marie Antoinette spent most of the following three years there.31 De Choiselle, Robert’s mentor, played a very important part in bringing her to France and arranging her marriage with the heir to the French throne.32 He could have recommended his protégé, 30 In all his large works, such as the fine series in Louvre…the scenic element, accompanied by a strong

vein of archeological interest, is predominant, and in spite of brilliant lighting, masterly treatment of the sky, and general work unalike excellence of execution, it becomes wearisome except in work fulfilling as do the four fine panels of dining room of La Muette, the decorative purpose for which they were intended. The remarkable example in the cоllection of M. Léopold Goldschmidt – to which some admirable groups of figures were added by Boucher – shows precisely the same tendencies; it is only in relatively unimportant studies, such, for instance, as three brilliant sketches of the little Trianon with a sparkle of figures on a background of foliage and sunlit trees, that he ventures on that freer interpreta-tion which may justify us in regarding him to some extent as, like Lantana, a forerunner of the school which developed itself in the following century: E. F. Dilke, French Painters of the XVIIIth Century, George Bell and Sons, London 1899, 185.

31 The estate and the palace of La Muette were in the possession of the royal family from the 17th century. At that time the small palace was renovated for Marguerite de Valois, and at the beginning of the 18th century it became the residence of the duchess De Berry. Louis XV reconstructed it in 1741-45, when the building became known as the “other palace“. During the Revolution La Muette became the property of the state and the estate was subsequently divided into smaller parcels and sold. Sebastian Érard, the piano maker who was the music teacher of Marie Antoinette, came into the possession of the palace in 1820. He added a long gallery in which he exhibited his large collection of paintings, one of the most significant in Europe. His son Pierre Érard sold the collection in 1831 and rented the palace. At the begin-ning of the 20th century La Muette belonged to the heirs of the Comtes de Franqueville, and around the year 1920, became the residence of baron Henri de Rothschild, at which time the original palace disappeared entirely and a new building was erected in its place, one which housed and exhibited the baron’s art collection in the period between the two world wars. As of 1949, the building houses the see of ОECD: M.W. Oborne, A History of the Château de la Muette, Paris 1999, 101.

32 J. A. de Goncourt, Histoire de Marie- Antoinette, vol. II, Firen Didot, Paris 1859, 8-10.

Rue Rе... (figs. 16, 17).28 Not only does this inscription prove that the painting was in the possession of the Parisian banker Léopold Goldschmidt who had an exceptionally important collection of works of art,29 it also points to other information which appears in bibliography and is related to the circumstances under which the painting was created.

In the brief analysis of Robert’s work presented in the book published by Emily Dilke in 1899, we find direct mention of four fine panels of dining room of La Muette... The remarkable example in the cоllection of M. Léopold Gold-

28 The inscription is made in black pencil on the left side of the upper horizontal beam of the key stretcher.

29 Baron Léopold Benedict Hayum Goldschmidt, 1830-1904, had in his collection works by Dürer, Titian, Memling, Terborch, Rembrandt, Van Dyck, Fragonard, Robert, sculptures by Hudon, which are kept today in great museums throughout the world, from the Louvre to the Metropolitan. Apart from the old masters, Goldschmidt also collected works of Gustave Moreau. He also had a respectable collection of the applied arts. Goldschmidt donated some of his paintings to museums even in his lifetime (Die Kunst 1903, 366), and some of the works were sold after the death of his wife Regine Bischoffsheim Goldschmidt, 1834-1905.

16. & 17. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, details of the back of the canvas with the inscription on the key stretcher

18. Château de La Muette, Paris


recently back from his studies in Rome and accepted at the Salons, and seen to it that he became involved in the complex process of decorating the royal palaces. Should we accept the possibility that Boucher did paint the figures on Robert’s painting, then that picture had have been finished prior to the ar-rival of Marie Antoinette to La Muette, because 1770 is the year of Boucher’s death.

The data, offered by Dilke, that there were four large paintings made for the dining hall of that palace stands in accordance with that mentioning four paintings of equal dimension at the sale of the collection of Randon de Boisset. Both sources of information are unison regarding their authors – Robert and Boucher, as a painter of figures. Had these paintings actually been intended for La Muette, they left the palace shortly after and reached the collection of de Boisset. Because Louis XVI introduced reforms, as part of his broader efforts to resolve the general and in particular the economic crisis in France, and introduced sanctions which implied the abolishment of apanage to numerous palaces as well as their closing down, the removal of art works which they had once housed, as attested by a number of examples, as well as their appearance on the market, were common. Considering the fact that La Muette, in its entirety, along with the Madrid palace, found its way to the market in 1788, after the king had ceased with its exploit, one can not rule out the possibility that certain art works may have already been put on sale prior to that date.33 Had Robert’s painting been made for La Muette, the commission for the Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola must have come from king Louis XVI, and not from a collector.

In the absence of other data and documents which could offer definite and irrevocable arguments in favor of one of the two theses, all we can do for now is sum up our research carried out so far:

Four paintings of the same, monumental dimensions which appeared at the sale of De Boisset’s collection, one of which was the Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, were created for the decoration of some rep-resentative space. In all probability that space was the Câteau de La Muette. The decorative panel made for La Muette mentioned in the book by Emily Dilke as a representative example of Robert’s composition with Boucher’s figures, from the collection of Leopold Goldschmidt, is, most probably, the work now kept in the National Museum.

The figures on the painting were most probably painted by Boucher. Their exceptional quality indicates that they are the work of a virtuoso in representing human and animal bodies (figs. 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25). That is confirmed by the above mentioned relevant sources. Moreover, it is hard to believe that Boucher’s name was added just to increase the value and the price of the paintings from the collection. Hubert Robert who was at the peak of his fame at the time of the sale of De Boisset’s collection in 1777 and

33 M.W. Oborne, op. cit., 101. These two palaces were not sold in 1788 after all. The reason was the high price of the property.

19.-25. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, details





himself involved with the Nazis in transactions related to the sale of art works, makes clear mention of this particular painting of Robert’s. It was part of the large lot of art works which were to be sold through the Wildenstein Gallery in January 1944. This transaction was never realized but the painting was, nonetheless, sold several months later.36 As listed in German archive mate-rial, on July 17th, 1944, through the merchant Hans W. Lange it was acquired for Hitler’s museum in Linz.37 Data on the painting, as well as its photograph, exist in the documentation of Hitler’s museum which is kept today in the Ger-man Historical Museum in Berlin.38 The official site of the Museum presents a photograph as well as basic information on this work of art. The name give to the painting is descriptive: Large landscape with a part and double stair-case, a well and washer women. It is dated to around 1758, and the names Robert, Hubert and Boucher, Francoise (1733-1808) appear as identification of the authors. Together with data related to technique and dimensions (217 х 148 cm), the inventory number of the Collecting Point in Munich (4592) is also recorded.39 Under history it is noted that the former owner is not known. Delivery: Paintings Hans W. Lange/Berlin and Vienna (Art Trade Germany, acquired 1944). Location: Yugoslavia (wrong restitution).

Together with the entire lot of works of fine and applied arts and other valuables, in June 1949 the painting was sent from Munich in the name of war restitution. The entire undertaking was organized by Ante Topić Mimara who, at that moment, was engaged on the task of wartime restitution of Yu-goslav property.40 Those objects were subsequently turned over to different state institutions for safe keeping.41 In July 1949, the paintings were taken over from the Ministry of science and culture and the Reparations Commit-tee of the Government of the FPRY and, based on the assesment, according to the notes and lists put together by a committee of experts, was admitted in

36 Dequoy, seconded by Fabiani, delivered an Еighteenth-century landscape attributed to Hubert Robert and to Boucher, and six smaller works.. .All were to go to the Linz museum.... the trans-action never happened. The landscape was later sold in Berlin for 3,5 million francs to the art dealer Lange, who in turn sold it to the Linz museum: H. Feliciano, The Lost Museum, The Nazi conspiracy to steal the world’s greatest works of art, Basic Books, New York 1997, 119-120.

37 Bundesarchiv Berlin 457-08-39 (Jugoslawien), Unbekannt und Urtumliche Restitutionen; Page 3, SHEDULE A; Liste of Yugoslavian Property from Central Collecting Point, Munich, date 2nd June 1949, (4th shipment); no. 4, Munich no. 4592/…3241 French, early 19th c.ptg. The parc of Villa d’Este, Claim no. 1656-A/18. Note by the number 4592 ...b) 17.7. 1944 aus franz. Privatbe-sitz über Kunsth. H.W. Lange, Berlin für RM 250.000…

38 Since 2008 documentation is accessible from the web site of Deutsches Нistorisches Mu-seum, created in cooperation with BADV: http://www.dhm.de/gos-cgi-in/linz/satz.cgi?Objekt=li004514 (Künstler:Robert, Hubert und Boucher, François (1733-1808) / Voerbe-sitzer: keine Angaben (Privatbesitz Frankreich)/Einliferung: Gemälde Hans W Lange/Berlin und Wien (Kunsthandel Deutscchland, 1944 verkauft)/Verbleib: Jugoslawien (irrtümlich dor-thin restituiert).

39 Paintings from Göring’s and Hitler’s collection were transferred to the Collection Point in Munich from which restitutions were made in the period between 1945 and 1952, after re-quests made by various states and according to documents of pre-war owners.

40 Robert’s painting was on the List of Works from June 2nd, 1949, no. 4: French, early 19th.c.ptg…..The Parc of Villa d’Este…. Archive of Yugoslavia: 54-319-483. Archive of J. B. Tito, КМЈ – III- 4/15. See also: V. Kusin, Mimara, Centar za informacije i publicitet, Zagreb 1987, 111-118.

41 М. Terzić, Josip Broz Tito i Ante Topić Mimara, Vojnoistorijski glasnik 46/1 (1997), 147-161.

was fully established within the institutions of the system, and as the author of a number of works from that collection, had to have been informed of their displacement. It is, thus, highly improbable that the authors of the day made mistakes regarding his paintings, in this case in attributing the figures to Boucher.

Based on all of the above, we come to the conclusion that the painting Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola was the product of direct collaboration of Hubert Robert and Francoise Boucher. That means that the painting was made in the period between 1765 and 1770, or, more precisely, around 1768-69, as part of a cycle of pictures intended for the decoration of a representative space, probably of the La Muette palace.

How long those paintings dwelt at the palace remains unknown for now. Prior to their sale in 1777 they were in the collection of Randon de Boisset.

The fate of the painting in the 20th Century

Inscriptions on the key stretcher offer elements for a partial reconstruc-tion of the history of the painting in the 20th century.

On the upper horizontal bar we read: M. Leopold Goldschmidt Rue Rе. … in black pencil; Geraudeau(?) et Jules atte(lieur?)/ 19/6 in graphite pencil and a different handwriting (figs. 16, 17).

The number 4592 (number at the Central Collecting Point, München) is written in several places.

Up to the first years of the 20th century the painting was a part of the col-lection of Leopold Goldschmidt. Following the death of the owner and his wife, as of 1905, art works from the Goldschmidt collection appear on the market, offered for sale by their heirs. Cayeux and Ananoff note that Robert’s painting was present on the Parisian market in the 1930’s.34

This painting was an object of trade also during World War II when a con-siderable number of art works from the occupied territories, under different circumstances, whether through transactions of selling and buying or, most often, as the result of theft from the rightful owners, mostly Jews, was trans-ported to Germany and ended up in the collections of Göring and Hitler.35 On top of that, there was a network of dealers who trade in art works throughout Europe. Thus, in 1944 this painting of Robert’s appeared on the market and was sold. It left France and was acquired for the museum Hitler planned to establish in Linz. The testimony on shipments organized by Roger Dequoy, one of the most active Parisian merchants and suppliers of Göring’s and Hit-ler’s agents, offered by the collector and art dealer Martin Fabiani, who was

34 J. de Cailleux, Robert a pris modèle sur Boucher, 105; А. Ananoff, op.cit., 327.35 This issue has been dealt with extensively in existing bibliography. See: G.Haase 2000, Die

Kunstsammlung des Reichsmarschalls Hermann Göring. Eine Dokumentation, Quintessenz Verlags-GmbH, Berlin 2000; G. Haase, Die Kunstsammlung Adolf Hitler. Eine Dokumenta-tion, Quintessenz Verlags-GmbH, Berlin 2002.


The original canvas comprises of two pieces joined together by hand along the vertical axis in order to achieve the required width. The stitch is found at a distance of circa 19 cm from the present right border of the painting. The original dimensions of the painting can not be determined with any degree of certainty. The present width of the original parts is not the same down the entire length of the painting, considering the fact that the stitch is not entirely straight. The left side of the artist’s canvas has a width of 126.5 to 128.3 cm while the right measures 17 to 18.5 cm. Parts of the canvas which were added at a later date, in the process of lining have the following width measurements: on the upper side 2 to 3, on the lower 5 to 5.5, and 1.5 to 2 cm on the lateral

edges. They bear representations painted to fit the elements of the original composition. The added parts were painted over a single-layer white ground, as opposed to the original double ground which is made up of two layers – the lower being red and the upper grey.43

The key stretcher comprises of a cross formed by a single vertical and two horizontal cross bars. (fig. 23)

The second restoration was carried out after the lining. A tear in the lower part of was closed up by gluing a piece of canvas on the back side of the paint-ing. This damage can also be detected on the front face of the painting, on

43 Technical examination was performed in the course of conservation-restoration works. We hereby extend our gratitude to Sofija Kajtez, senior restorer of the National Museum of Bel-grade, Sanja Lazić, painter-conservation expert, and Milica Stojanović M.A., chemist, for their assistance in the analysis of technical particularities of the painting, determining the scope of previously performed restoration interventions and IC photographs. The results of their investigation of the paintings of Hubert Robert in the National Museum in Belgrade will soon be published. Credits for UV photographs go to Veljko Ilić, photographer of the National Museum, to whom we also extend our gratitude.

the National Museum in Belgrade42 From that time on, the work of Hubert Robert Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola is kept in the Col-lection of European art.

Technical characteristics of the painting

The painting was made using oil colors on canvas and has in the past un-dergone several interventions of conservation and restoration.

42 Archive of Yugoslavia: 54-319-483: Art Museum, no. 501 од 2.VII 1949. Record no. 16. French school XVIII century. Park of villa D’Este, 217/149.

26. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, the back of the canvas with key stretcher

27.-28. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, detail, photo in the infrared spectrum.


However, his capacity to recreate, recompose, recontextualize, was particu-larly vital. Among others, this is attested also by his painting kept at the Na-tional Museum.

It reflects Robert’s edification in Rome at the time of emergence of neo-classicistic aesthetics, of which we have spoken earlier. Monumental, imagi-nary architectural forms were created under the influence of Piranesi.45 Small figure which were often added, at times by the hand of a different artist, as-sume poses which repeat the dominant lines of the composition.

A strong influence of Piranesi’s work, himself a master of architectural representations, professor of perspective at the French Academy in Rome, is clearly present on the painting from Belgrade. As mentioned, Robert em-phasized the significance of the Roman painter in his personal formation all his life, while art dealers noted a large collection of Panini’s works in his possession.

As we can conclude, among others, from the Belgrade painting, Robert relied on Panini’s arrangement of buildings distributed along the entire width of the painting, a shallow, stage-like front plane and, above the architectural structures, a distant vista. He followed Panini’s choice of architectural ele-ments, especially the balustrades and staircases. Like Panini, he paid little at-tention to the actual size or relation between the individual architectural ele-ments. However, although most of Robert’s pictorial ideas come from Panini’s works, his veduttas were different. He created an impression of the size of

45 D. Laroque, Le Discours de Piranese: L’ornement sublime et le suspens de l’architecture, Paris 2000, 87.

photographs made using the infra-red spectrum (figs. 24, 25), and partly also the ultra-violet as well as the visible part of the spectrum, specifically on the figures of two women in front of the fountain. (fig. 26). This intervention was also performed prior to the arrival of this work of art at the National Museum. On the back, the lining used to restore the damage inflicted on the painting reveals the outline of the vertical stitch of the original canvas.

As already mentioned, the upper horizontal bar of the stretcher bears the following inscription: M. Leopold Goldschmidt Rue Rе. … in black pencil; Ger-audeau(?) et Jules atte(lieur?)/ 19/6 in graphite pencil and in a different hand-writing (сл. 16, 17). The number 4592 (the number pertaining to the Central Collection Point at Munich) appears in several places. The number 19 is writ-ten on the junction of the vertical cross bar and the upper horizontal bar.

Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola and the aesthetics of the picturesque

Throughout his entire career Hubert Robert adopted already sought out solutions – of other artists or his own – and arranged them into new picto-rial bodies.44 Because of the large number of his practically identical works, many art historians considered him a painter “without substance“. From the perspective of the first half of the 20th century, his paintings, compared to contemporary historical paintings, appeared decorative and lightweight.

44 On the evolution of Robert’s paintings from the first sketches, through composition studies, to the final work and its variations: Cailleux 1967; id., 1979: i-iv.

29. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, detail

30. François Boucher, Le Moulin, Мusée du Louvre, Paris, 1751, oil on canvas,


the example from Belgrade, the curves and arrangement of the elements don’t allow the eye to find a single point that would fix and guild his glance. Such a multiplicated vantage point corresponds to the open, unfinished and non-heroic themes, as well as the suggestive and poetic forms.

The aesthetics of the first half of the century, based on the sensual and the participation of the observer, is, for the most part, encompassed by the term picturesque. At the same time, that term is indispensable in explaining Robert’s entire opus, including the Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola.

Pittoresque is the key category of Roccoco art which reduces all artistic forms to “picture“. In his Cours de рeinture from 1708, Roger de Piles, an ad-vocate of developing an autonomous glossary of the visual arts, defines it as a quality essential for a painter.49 As an element of literary and visual art it was officially recognized by the Académie Française in 1732.50 While, in the begin-ning, this descriptive term denoted an immediate beauty of line and color, a balance of structure and a harmony of color, in time it became associated with the irregular and the unexpected, in nature as well as in art. Gradually, it focused on landscape, landscape painting and garden design. In the second part of the century it denoted a rounded off aesthetic category.51

During the first half of the 18th century this aesthetic category was devel-oped most thoroughly and fully in France.52 In French culture the picturesque became the form of choice particularly among the authors of the travelogue literary genre, as well as among representatives of an emerging, new literary genre – that of art criticism, as well as those who wrote on the subject of gar-den and park design.

The aesthetics of the picturesque shaped the most popular genres of visual culture of the 18th century – veduttas and capricci, which, as we have already pointed out, were among the forms most often found in Robert’s opus. The French terms сaprice originates from the Italian word capriccio which was used for a number of diverse fantastic themes in Baroque art, most often for representations of cities in the representation of the architecture of which the real was combined with the imaginary. In France, the inclusion of the term

49 R. de Piles, Cours de peinture par principes avec un balance de peintres, Paris 1989, 106-110.50 Cf.: Dictionnaire de L’Académie Française, Sixieme edition 1835, Tome II, 423.51 The earliest use of this term in the sense of “picture like“ is not precise: Giorgio Vasari relies on

the term alla pittoresca in explaining similar phenomena in painting, and Marco Boschini and Giovanni Battista Volpato use it in the second half of the 17th century to denote the typical Venetian mode of painting; pittoresco is used also by Guido Antonio Costa in 1654, to describe architecture. The painter Salvatorе Rosa, in his letter of 1662, uses the term pittoresco to de-scribe nature on his journey from Loreto to Rome. Рittoresco has been defined by Francesco Milizia in Dizionario delle belle arte del disegno in 1797 as that which befits a painting. As an aesthetic ideal, the picturesque is especially developed in England, most of all owing to Wil-liam Gilpin’s Observations on the River Wye (1782) and Three Essays: on Picturesque Beauty: On Picturesque Travel, and On Sketching Landscape (1792), where picturesque is defined as a term expressive of the peculiar kind of beauty, which is agreable in a picture. On the history of the term and on the picturesque as an aesthetic category: J. Dixon Hunt, The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting and Gardening During the Eighteenth Century, Baltimore, London 1976; id., The Picturesque Garden in Europe, London 2002.

52 On that in: W. Munsters, La poétique du pittoresque en France de 1700 à 1830, Genève 1991, 8-16.

concept and form, which was as much an influence of Piranesi’s work as of the French pictorial tradition.

This tradition had a high degree of leverage in the formation of Robert’s art, as attested also by the painting from the National Museum. A posthu-mous inventory of Robert’s possessions shows that he owned more than 200 works painted by Boucher.46 Although not alone on the task, Boucher was most steadfast in creating a specific French pictorial field.47 From the middle of the century he was, among other things, the most prominent master of picturesque landscape which had a deep influence on his direct and indirect pupils, and especially Fragonard and Robert (fig. 30). Boucher’s fêtes champê-tres shaped Robert’s sensitive and poetic treatment of light and shadow, color, atmospheric effects, as well as his light brush strokes and typically Roccoco рapillotage. Boucher’s influence turned Robert into a painter who enjoyed the reputation of the “most painterly“ of all French artists of his time. There-fore, the work of Robert must be observed also as part of the French Roccoco tradition.

The formal organization of Robert’s paintings, as demonstrated by the painting from the National Museum, derives from a tradition established at the beginning of the century, i.e. with Antoine Watteau’s fêtes galantes. The “circulating“ vantage pint and the panoramic scope of circa 180 degrees, rely on Watteau’s innovative solutions. The same is true of human figures, too. They come in crescent shape which gives the painting a feeling of constant flow of their mutual communication. As in the entire field of French art of the first half of the century, the painted figures, whether by Boucher of the Boucher type, are an expression of social configuration and not of individual physiognomies and activities. The people in the painting are more generic than particular representations: they represent le petit peuple from the envi-rons of Rome. They are shown performing their everyday and usual activities and are not fixed in any specific narrative part. From Watteau and the “seman-tic vacuum“ on his paintings, which appeared as an essential and dramatic contrast to the former plenitude of information – the narrative, the expres-sions, the gestures, the movements – on historical paintings, in French art it was common to represent themes which could not be precisely explained by words.48 The bright and translucent genre scene taking place within the setting of monumental Renaissance architecture in ruins is broken down into endless poetic and lyrical interpretations. The observer of the painting is drawn into rounding off its visuality. Although Robert’s paintings were stable and constructed around a strong horizontal or vertical mass, as shown also by 46 In the inventory of Robert’s studio we find, among other things, nine paintings by Boucher,

25 framed drawings and 12 lots with a great number of individual pages: С. Gabillot, Hubert Robert et son temps, Librairie de l’art, Paris 1895, 266-267.

47 On that: Ј. Hedley, François Boucher. Seductive Visions, ex. cat Wallace Collections, London 2004; М. Hyde, Making Up the Rococo. François Boucher and His Critics, Los Angeles 2006.

48 On that: N. Bryson, Word and Image: French Painting of the Ancien Régime, Cambridge 1981, 74; Е. Rothstein, Ideal Presence and Non-Finito in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics, Eighteenth-Century Studies 9 (1976), 307-322; M. Vidal, Watteau’s Painted Conversations. Art. Literature and Talk in Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century France, New Haven and London 1992, 11-74.


tion.57 Robert became the central figure in this particular domain of neoclas-sicistic culture in France.58

The zenith of the development of the picturesque in visual culture, around the middle of the 18th century, is marked also by the emergence of a fascina-tion with the sublime, inspired by the publishing of Edmund Burke’s A Philo-sophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful in 1756. It appears in a series of literary studies from the second half of the cen-tury, in particular in Les ruines, ou méditations sur les révolutions des empires by Comte de Volney from 1781, and Le plaisir de la ruine by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre from 1784, as well as in visual culture. In time, Robert’s represen-tations of ruins will exert a strong influence on the aesthetics of the sublime. Robert’s paintings will become the visual definition of the ideal of the sublime – grandeur, roughness, irregularity of form and dramatic contrast of light and darkness.

The Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola is certainly not a typical painting of ruins, but it is, nonetheless, a visual representation of this tradition. Robert, Fragonard and other students of the Académie de France à Rome, often presented Renaissance villas assailed by the passing of time, especially those from Caprarola and Tivoli, and found therein a picturesque beauty and atmosphere. Even when he painted buildings untouched by time, such as the colonnade of St. Peter’s in Rome, Robert included in his pictures imaginary ruins with niches between the columns. For Robert and his gen-eration, ruins were more eloquent than unscathed buildings, for they offered testimony of particular manifestations of material culture in the continuum of time and history. Vraie nature, the true nature of architecture can be disclosed only with the passing of time and as a product of the artist’s capacity to suggest the process of its decline and degradation.

Denis Diderot shared the same thoughts, the same idiom of aesthetic criti-cism and representation. He believed that ruins are more inspiring than un-touched structures. The hand of time has sewn over the moss that covers them the spirit of great ideas and melancholy feelings. Essentially, he invented the concept of la poétique des ruines which implies representing not only the ex-terior appearance of ruins, but their atmosphere as well. Diderot understands the picturesque and the sublime in the presentation of ruins as something that draws in the dramatic capacity of the observer. He was the one who fully articulated the contemporary view of ruins and became the most eloquent

57 French painters dealt with this theme on heroic and pastoral landscapes already during the 17th century. Panini’s influence will drive its development in a different direction. As of 1724 he will flinch before the standard of size and grandeur established by Giovanni Nicolano Geronimo Servandoni who arrived to Académie royale de peinture in Paris from Italy as a painter of architecture. His work is most significant for the development of a more sugges-tive and emotional way of depicting ruins in France, and he became the major model for the new generation of ruinistes: R. Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art, Princeton N. J. 1967, 113.

58 J. D. Bandiera, Form and Meaning in Hubert Robert’s Ruin Caprices: Four Paintings of Fictive Ruins for the Château de Méréville, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 15/1: An Edu-cated Task: Neoclassicism at the Art Institute (1989), 20-37, 82-85.

caprice in the general discourse takes place at the turn of the century at which time it denotes an imaginary activity and the parting with the principles of imitation, a shift from the classical, academic idea of beauty towards a per-sonal experience of the aesthetic. The semantic expansion of this concept is tied to the Age of Enlightenment.53 Pittoresque implies the capricious, and capricious encompasses the picturesque, so that the two categories become inseparable although, naturally, they are not identical. In visual culture of the 18th century the capriccio is, above all, an imaginary arrangement of monu-ments from times past, a memento inspiring the fantasy of the observer, in particular among the wealthy participants of the Grand Tour.

Because of their symbolical and structural connotations, in French litera-ture the ruins, as a motif, appear as a picture.54 They become an ideal form of the aesthetic of the picturesque which transformed them from a symbol of denigration into an aesthetic pleasure. Their irregularity, the tension be-tween the original form and the present condition, the prospect of further dilapidation, their intertwining with nature and its free forms, the light flow-ing through them, turned them into a major focus of artistic invention.55 They held a unique position in the visual, literary and emotional corpus of French 18th century culture and in the opus of Hubert Robert. The work of Robert des Ruines marks the apogee of French ruin painting. In it the remains of the past stand as an organic metaphor which lived and passed away, disintegrated by nature and the passing of time. Such a view of ruins in Robert’s art was, above all, under the influence of Piranesi,56 as well as of the French rovinistic tradi-

53 On that in: P. Ilie, Caprichio/Caprichoso: A Glossary of Eighteenth-Century Usages, Hispanic Review 44 (1976), 239-255; J. Starobinski, L’Invention de la liberte 1700-1789, Genève 1987.

54 There are three main periods of use of the ruins motif in French literature: in the 17th century ruins symbolized man’s life and fate; in the 18th they were associated with the aesthetics of the picturesque; from the close of the 18th century they functioned as a structural component of literary works. When, in the 18th century, ruins became an aesthetic pleasure, traditional ter-minology became inadequate and, thus, writers relied on terms adopted from the visual arts to create the impression of their appearance and structure: G. Daemmrich, The Ruins Motif as Artistic Device in French Literature I, II, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 30/4 (1972), 449-457, 31/1 (1972), 31-41. On ruins as an aesthetic object: R. Ginsberg, The Aesthteics of Ruins, Bucknell Review 18 (1970), 89-101.

55 On that: J. Augustin, Subjectivity in the Fictional Ruin: The Caprice Genre, Romanic Review 91, (2000), 75-89; B. Haley, Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure, Albany 2003, 23.

56 Piranesi determines ruins as archaeological references in Antichità Romane and Della mag-nificenza ed Architettura de’ Romani 1761, but, at the same time, fashions them also as an emotional category: P. Zucker, Ruins. An Aesthetic Hybrid, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20/2 (1961), 119-130.


literary voice of that cult at the Salon of 1767, standing before a painting made by Robert. The Grande Galérie éclairée du fond produced an emotional out-break of a sort and it is then that he wrote: Oh! les belles, les sublimes ruines!... Quel effet! quelle grandeur! quelle noblesse! Then, Diderot’s critique departed from the trajectory of ekphrasis and directed the beholder’s attention to Rob-ert’s capriccio: “The ideas that ruins awake in me are important. Everything is obliterated, all perishes, all passes. There is nothing but the world that re-mains. Time, is all that remains. How old is earth is! I move between two eternities. No matter where my eyes fall, the objects that surround me speak of an end…How can my transient existence be of comparison to this boulder that is collapsing… I can see the marble tombstones disintegrate into dust, and I do not wish to die! A torrent is dragging one nation over another to the depths of a common abyss; pretend all alone to stop on the edge and cleave the waters that rush by my sides.“59 At that moment the beholder became an active participant in the spectacle of ruination which envelops him and gives him immense pleasure.

The birth of the poetics of ruins at the Salon of 1767 can be characterized as a result of fear generated by the presentation of ruins, one which drove the observer to construct parallel images of his own universe of ruins. In time, Di-derot, and such is the case with other literatti of the times too, shows a certain disinclination from the picturesque and focus is redirected to the sublime. An integration of ruins into the natural environment evokes the sentiment de la mélancolie, ever more popular in the second half of the 18th century.60

Art criticism of the day resounds with centuries long antagonism towards non-historical genres but, because of the continuing growth in their popu-larity and changes in the broader phenomenological domain, as well as the recognition of their value.61 Diderot who believed that art must be public, honest and emotionally binding, saw in Robert’s painting of ruins an effort to reach the dignity of historical painting. Robert’s pictures of ruins which encompass both historicism and genre offered proof of Diderot’s doctrine of peinture morale. Thus, in the eyes of Diderot, Robert assumed the status of excellent peintre de ruines antiques and grand artiste.62

In the pre-revolutionary climate of general insecurity, the works of Robert des Ruines, especially those showing contemporary urban entities as ruins,

59 D. Diderot, Ruines et paysages, Salon de 1767, XI, 228-230.60 R. Mortier, La Poetique des ruines en France, Genève 1974, 88-97. On Diderot’s thoughts before

Robert’s paintings: M. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot, Univ. of California Press 1980, 128-130.

61 On that: R. Wrigley, The Origins of French Art Criticism From the Ancien Régime to the Rеstoration, Oxford 1993.

62 On Diderot’s later ambivalent critiques of Robert’s painting we spoke previously in the text of this book, in the chapter entitled Hubert Robert and French Culture of the 18th Century.

31. Hubert Robert, Vue imagi-naire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines, 1796, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris


glorified the sublime powers of destruction (fig. 31).63 However, those paint-ings were created at a much later date than the Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola. At the moment Robert was working on this particular painting he was not counting on the presence of an acute sense of the sublime in the eye and soul of the beholder so that he follows the path of poetic pres-entation of the destructive capacity of time which arouses aesthetic pleasure and agreeable meditation.

This was precisely the quality required of the painted decoration of petites maisons, maisons de plaisance, as well as of that of the royal chateaux. Robert’s compositions produced for the palaces Maraveille and Bagatelle (fig. 32), and partly also for the royal palace at Fontainebleau, express a similar picturesque atmosphere and demonstrate аnalogous references to the culture of Antiquity and the Renaissance as the painting from the National Museum.64 Because of their picturesque charm, sophisticated forms and weighty messages, Robert’s visual representations offered an ideal setting for the educated elite, especially in moments of its retreat to the comfort of their country villas and palaces. The aristocracy appreciated Robert’s knowledge of classical and Renaissance antiquities and employed him, in the capacity of painter and garden design-er, to create their villas and parks in the guise of streams of water springing grom the “river of time“. Robert was successful in fashioning their domain as a “land of illusion“, a composite of coherently planned and skillfully realized “pictures“ in delicate harmony with the personality of the patron and histori-cal references he found relevant – whether of fact or fantasy.65 Robert’s vedute di fantasia and capricci were an integral part of more complex decorations of interiors and garden complexes which, together, evoked emotions – ranging from sentimental to sublime.

63 Robert’s most touching use of these ideas is found on Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvres en ruines of 1796 (fig. 31). On this painting, the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, reconstructed from 1795 to 1801 for the purpose of changing its function into a gallery of рaintings, is represented in its future guise as a ruin. Paris is inescapably treading down the path of imperial Rome and becoming a shattered image of its former glory. The painting ex-presses the aesthetics of the sublime which, in the opinion of Burke, produced the Revolution as “the most astonishing“ event, a “monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed and sometimes mix with each other in the mind: alternate contempt and indignation, alternate laughter and tears, alternate scorn and horror“: Е. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, London 1793, 21-22. The possibility that the painting was created as an expression of Robert’s dissatisfaction with politics and projects tied to the Louvre as a museum is cited in: P. R. Radisich, Hubert Robert. Painted Spaces of the Enlightenment, Cam-bridge Univ. Press, 1998, 129-133. The idea that this and other similar paintings by Robert ex-pressed the collective fear of destruction instigated, among other things, by the urban reform of Paris, cases of arson and other schemes in the “age of opportunity“ which radicalized the aesthetics of the sublime is discussed by: N. Dubin, Futures and Ruins: The Painting of Hubert Robert, Center 25 (2005), 87-89.

64 Cf. after: J. Baillio, Hubert Robert’s Decorations for the Château de Bagatelle, The Metropolitan Museum Journal 27 (1992), 149-182; P. R. Radisich, op.cit., 78-96, 97-116.

65 The expression pays d’illusion originates with Louis Carrogis Carmontelle, designer of the Parc Monceau: J. D. Bandiera, op.cit., 83.

32. Hubert Robert, The Portico of a Country Mansion, 1773, oil on canvas, Metro-politan Museum of Art, New York

The Park on the Lake

CONSIDERABLY SMALLER IN SIZE and later in date than the Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola is The Park on the Lake (fig. 2, 31,5 х 40 cm) painted in oil on canvas, most probably made of hemp.1 The ground of the canvas is double – the lower layer is red and the upper a light grey, practically white. In the course of earlier conservation-restoration inter-ventions it was lined on linen canvas and received a key stretcher with cross bars. At that time the lateral edges of the canvas were trimmed and covered with paper tape, the painting cleaned and retouched. In the course of the lat-est intervention the painting underwent technical examination and minimal conservation-restoration works.2

On the reverse side of the painting, on the key stretcher, there is an inscribed number 7554, its identification at the Collection Point in Munich, as well as on the list of objects transported to Yugoslavia in June 1949 which indicates the Göring collection as the possible point of origin.3 Like the previous painting, it was transferred to Yugoslavia as part of the action of collecting and transporting works of art organized by Ante Topić Mimara who was engaged in the business of war restitution of Yugoslav property.4

The painting is neither signed nor dated but was, nonetheless, admitted to the National Museum with an indisputably correct attribution.5

The park with a lake whose shore vanishes in the mist and blends with the sky, the distant mountains, the trees on the sides, the fountain in the shape of a pool, the blaustrade with bronze lions by the edge of the park, the stairs descending towards the lake, a sculpture, tiny, practically immaterial and wa-vering figures, rendered in a few masterly strokes, all speak of the character-istic expression of Hubert Robert’s pictorial idiom. Like a great number of his paintings, The Park on the Lake has no precise topographic determination.

1 Fibre analysis is carried out in collaboration with S. Kajtez, senior restorer of the National Museum in Belgrade, and M. Kostić, associate professor of the Chair for Textile Engineering of the Faculty of Technology and Metallurgy in Belgrade.

2 These works were carried out at the Conservation Center of the National Museum in Belgrade in the course of 2010-11. They were executed by restorers mentioned in footnote 43 of the previous chapter.

3 Archiv Berlin 457-08-39 (Jugoslawien), Unbekannt und Urtmliche Restitutionen, nо 7554 Rob-ert. H, Landschaft, Lwd. 32:40 cm…Herkunft unbekannt, wahrschl. Slg. H. Göring.

4 On that: V. Kusin, Mimara, Centar za informacije i publicitet, Zagreb 1987; M. Terzić, Josip Broz Tito i Ante Topić Mimara, Vojnoistorijski glasnik (1997), 147-161.

5 After to the records mentionded in footnote 1 of the previous chapter.

68 • I M A G I N A R Y G A R D E N S O F H U B E R T R O B E R T T H E P A R K O N T H E L A K E • 6 9

Like the Staircase of the Park of the Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, it can be identified as the iconographic type of veduta di fantasia – which combines real and fantastic architectural structures – of which Robert was the most prominent French representative.

Imaginary combinations of elements of architecture and landscape pro-vide the setting on Robert’s paintings regardless of the various phases of his creation. Structures of edifices and gardens of villas – Farnese, Sachetti, Mad-ama, Albani, Barioni, Medici, Frascatti, D’Este – which he had studied during his education in Rome, will be combined with French buildings, landscapes and parks. Ten years after his return from Italy, at the Salon of 1777, Robert gives precise identification of the location he is depicting for the last time. After that, Robert’s paintings are never topographically defined but, rather, carry generalized titles such as “an Italian garden“. From 1791, Robert no lon-ger exhibits paintings whose titles evoke memories of Italy.6

By the structure of the composition, the motifs and the dimensions, The Park on the Lake can be classified as part of the opus of imaginary vedut-tas which Robert created during the 1780’s. That is the time of his greatest artistic rise, important commissions and production of smaller format easel paintings with which he supplied a broad market. There is a large number of Robert’s paintings with similar or identical elements of composition, in particular the motif of the terrace with a balustrade and columns with bronze figures of lions. In that respect, the similarity of the painting from Belgrade with the lower parts of the composition Vue d’un parc, le jet d’eau from 1783 is evident (fig. 33). The Fontaine sous un portique (fig. 34) stands out as one

6 J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, Paris 1987, 50.

33. Hubert Robert, Vue d’un parc, le jet d’eau, 1783, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris

34. Hubert Robert, Fontaine sous un portique, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris


iconography and with a highly arcane sense of such an allusion.9 Robert is not represented as a mechanical imitator but rather as an anxious artist dedicated to a higher truth, unfathomable to the average man passing by him. As in other works, Robert disregards the portrayal of the face – his own or someone

9 On that, after the example of the English painter Zoffany: W. L. Pressly, Genius Unveiled: The Self-Portraits of Johan Zoffany, The Art Bulletin 69/1 (1987), 88-101.

of the closest analogies. Although, at first, glance, the general impression is quite different – mostly because of the architectural frame in which the scene is placed and numerous details – morphologically and phenomenologically it is very close to The Park on the Lake. Because of the quick, sketchy manner of painting, similar structural elements and practically identical dimensions, we can assume that they belonged to the same series. While the composition from the Louvre displays a great number of sculptures, The Park on the Lake has just one, on a pedestal with a plaque bearing an inscription leaning against its lower right part. Both paintings share another typical Robert motif – the artist in the act of painting, seated in front of the model. This motif is found on a great number of his drawings – from Italian capricci to paintings of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre. A direct source for the figure of the painter on the painting from Belgrade is found on his drawing entitled Hubert Robert dessinant un vase antique auprès du Colisée (fig. 35).7

It has already been pointed out that Robert was fond of representing him-self in his pictures. His self-representation almost always takes on the form of an artist enchanted in recording the spectacle of which he is both witness, participant and author, all at the same time. The inclusion of his own im-age in multifigural compositions, especially conversation pieces, as well as in landscapes, and representations of gardens in particular, is typical of the 18th century.8 Often, as on The Park on the Lake, the painter is represented in the act of creation, isolated from the people to whom he turns his back (fig. 36). This could be interpreted as an adaptation of the old tradition of self-expres-sion in the guise of melancholy genius although without the conventional

7 A similar example is found in the Museum of Valence and on sketches from the Graphics Collection of the Louvre, RF 37336 and RF 37337.

8 On representations of painters in landscapes of the 18th century: R. Strong, The Artist & the Garden, Yale Univ. Pr., New Haven, London 2000, 252-253.

35. Hubert Robert, Hubert Robert dessinant un vase antique auprès du Colisée, sanguine, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’archéologie de Besançon

36. Hubert Robert, The Park on the Lake, detail


37.-38. Hubert Robert, The Park on the Lake, details


else’s – but is presented as a man in elegant attire and comfortably positioned in front of his model, a mythological or allegorical figure which is difficult to decipher quite precisely. This type of corporeal “display“ was introduced to French painting by Watteau in his drawings and fêtes galantes, under the influence of the opera, ballet and theatre. From then on, the body as character – as it was called by the writers of the day – evokes a broad scope of states and emotions in the visual arts, literature and music.10 While the other figures on the painting from Belgrade – le petit peuple, generically speaking – are shown, as always with Robert, without characterization and any specific narrative role, his body, accentuated in red, is represented as direct and self-sufficient expression (fig. 37-40).

The Park on the Lake and picturesque garden

The Park on the Lake displays a vision of “the third nature“ – the imaginary space of a picturesque garden.11 We have already pointed out the term pittoresque encompasses, almost in its entirety, the aesthetics of the 18th century. It also encompasses the opus of Robert and, thus, the painting from the National Museum as well. In time, this term becomes ever more strongly associated with landscape, landscape painting and garden design and, through them, constructed as a rounded-off aesthetic category.

Aesthetics of the picturesque determined, to the greatest possible extent, the creation, presentation and perception of veduttas and capricci, and guided their growing popularity. At the same time, these art genres, dominantly present in Robert’s opus, contributed to the development of aesthetics of the picturesque which was the focus of dedication of authors of travelogues, art critics and theoreticians of garden design.

Garden design is a typical artistic manifestation of the 18th century. Gardens and parks were the field of experimentation and establishing of new theories and styles. Pittoresque i.e. picturesque or “natural“ garden, a phenomenon of the 18th century, reflected Enlightenment views of nature and landscape. Representatives of the Enlightenment saw nature as a field of exploration and self-perception, the goal of education and foundation of progress. Landscape was perceived as inevitable, progressive development, an expansion of culture into “natural“ spaces which are in the process of development, itself “natural“. Their views were shared by Robert’s patrons who, during the 1770’s and 1780’s, commissioned from him a number of painted and garden decorations.

10 On that: S. R, Cohen, Body as ’Character’ in Early Eighteenth-Century French Art and Performance, The Art Bulletin 78/3 (1996), 454-466.

11 Una terza natura is nature into which art has been incorporated. The concept originates from a classification based on Cicero’s idea of altera natura – cultivated nature with bridges, roads and other interventions adapted to human needs – which implies the existence of first nature, original, inartificial, wild. Оn this: J. D. Hunt, Ut Pictura Poesis, Ut Pictura Hortus, and the Picturesque, in: Gardens and the Picturesque: Studies in the History od Landscape Architecture, Cambridge, Mass. 1997, 105-136.

39.-40. Hubert Robert, The Park on the Lake, details


mathesis universalis.15 However, the structure of the French garden was not fully determined by Carthusian epistemology.16 Moreover, on the whole, the French garden is not an expression of the authoritarian political system.17 One of the most prominent theoreticians of horticulture of Robert’s time, Jean-Marie Morel, points out that French gardens are liberated from the inside, and those liberating concepts stem from Enlightenment and not the political system.18 Although the park must be observed as political discourse,19 one must keep in mind that it points to broader social and cultural constructs. Like numerous treatises on landscape design originating from Enlightenment concepts of nature, French gardens of the 18th century are a form which combines philosophy, science, politics, ethics and aesthetics.

Although French theoreticians contributed to the development of the picturesque garden already in the first half of the 18th century,20 the most significant treatises dedicated to this form of horticulture were published in the time of Robert’s artistic maturity. Their authors were most often also the ideators of their own gardens. Claude-Henri Watelet’s Essai sur les jardins from 1774 was particularly influential and it recommended irregular forms which invite the beholder to step into the “picture“ and, by changing his own position, change the arrangement of the garden as well.21 Such mutable “pictures“ were produced by Watelet himself, on his estate Moulin-Joli near Paris. The garden structure of Moulin-Joli, adapted to the existing state of nature, was celebrated in Rousseau’s novel Julie: ou la Nouvelle Héloïse from 1761, in the description of Heloise’s garden.22 Together with Rousseau, other intellectuals and artists also visited the estate. Among them Robert stood out as Watelet’s friend from Rome and created several illustrations of the water

15 On that: A. Weiss, Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics, New York 1995, 67.

16 On that: B. Wellman-Aron, On Other Grounds. Landscape Gardening and Nationalism in Eighteenth-Century England and France, State University of New York Press 2001, 9-11.

17 Because the central axis of Versailles, one which opens to eternity, is the semantic support which sustains the entire system and a symbol of the Sun King and his power, linear vistas in French gardens were interpreted as an expression of a repressive political system: A. Weiss, op. cit., 62-63.

18 Jean-Marie Morel, Théorie des jardins, ou l’art des jardins de la Nature, Paris 1776, 195, 243-244, 301.19 W. J. T. Mitchell, Introduction, in: Landscape and Power, Chicago 1994, 1-4, 2. The fact that the

so-called јardin anglo-chinois originated from the views of the physiocrates, focused on agri-cultural reform, has been pointed out by: D. Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France, Princeton Un. Press 1978, 102.

20 During the 1730’s, the theater writer and garden designer Charles Duffresny advocates the idea of necessity of irregular garden shapes. In the opinion of theoreticians of the day, he cre-ated a new style of horticulture before William Kent, i.e. the picturesque garden. The critic Jean-Francois Blondel in Maisons de plaisance of 1736 was of the same opinion: D. Wiebenson, op. cit., 9, 14.

21 C. H. Watelet, Essai sur les jardins, Paris 1774, el. edit., 56, 106-107, 109, 156, 198.22 It was believed earlier that Rousseau’s thoughts on gardens and landscapes, expounded in this

famous novel, were influenced by the English tradition. However, Rousseau’s description of the garden as natural and simple reflect French 18th century tradition, especially the ideas of his friend Watelet, and not the English “natural“ movement, which he criticized. The same can be said of Diderot’s concept of uncultivated nature which was shaped by French thought, and in particular by the philosophy of Rousseau: D. Wiebenson, op. cit., 29-39.

A painter and a designer of gardens is a hybrid typical of the 18th century, but it was Robert’s drifting between the worlds of twodimensional and tridimensional illusionism that his contemporaries judged as most elegant, most successful and “most natural“.

As we have pointed out, after taking part in the designing of the new park at Versailles in 1777, Robert received the title of Dessinateur des Jardins du Roi. Because that title had not been given to anyone after the death of Le Notre in 1700, it is evident that Robert had impressed the court with his extraordinary capacities in the field of garden design. He designed the royal gardens at Campiégne, Rambouillet12 and Trianon,13 where his career as garden designer, most probably, first began. He also created garden and painted decorations for elite hôtels, estates and palaces. Experiences like those are woven into The Park on the Lake. As pointed out already, it does not represent any specific but rather an imaginary domain which combines memories of gardens of Renaissance villas and knowledge of the French gardens of his epoch.

During the previous, 17th century, the French garden was under strong influence of Renaissance interpretation of gardens of ancient Roman villas which established the horticulture of antiquity as the main point of reference of garden design.14 The zenith of garden fashioning was reached in Versailles in the age of Louis XIV. With the dawning of the new century, the French garden was constantly transformed and became ever more “picture-like“, yielding to the principles of the aesthetics of the picturesque. Regardless of the differences, all French gardens of the 18th century shared a specific common trait: elements of nature were composed into a series of more or less controlled “pictures“.

However, the specific nature of French doctrines and techniques in the field of horticulture had systematically and for decades been denied in favor of the domination of the English landscape “movement“. The French garden was declared artificial, the English natural. The English style of nature “for its own sake“ was seen, already in the time of creators, as an expression of modernity, progress and freedom, while the French was associated with absolutism and tyranny. The differences between the “regular“ French and “irregular“ English garden were interpreted in the context of intelligibility and sensibility, opposition between René Descartes and John Locke. The French garden, embodied in Le Notre’s park at Versailles, was seen as an oppressor of nature, a rational scheme created in the idiom of Descartes’s

12 Count D’Angivillers set Robert as overseer of the construction of the laiterie de la reine in the woods behind Chateau de Rambouillet. “The Queen’s Dairy“, a present from Louis XVI to his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette, was created in 1786, simultaneously with the Queen’s Chateau at Petit Trianon at Versailles. Robert lead a team of artists and artisans, among whom was Lagrenee, director of Sevres: C. C. Young, Marie Antoinette’s Dаiry at Rambouillet, Magazine Antiques, October 1, 2000.

13 J. de Cayeux , Hubert Robert et les jardins, 80-84.14 On the influence of the Italian Renaissance garden: M. Baridon, Les mots, les images et la mé-

moire des jardins, in: Le Jardin, art et lieu de mémoire, М. Моusser, P. Nys eds., Besancon 1995, 183-203.


viewing and feeling. In perceiving its beauty, the “passer by“ activates all his senses, not only sight.29

The picturesque effect of the park on the painting from Belgrade is enhanced by the depiction of slightly dilapidated architectural structures, for they, in the eyes of Robert, were the ones which completed the pleasure of imagination and reminiscence. They are integrated with nature because, being the product of human creation, they are overcome by nature.

The qualities which characterize The Park on the Lake – picturesque charm inspired by integration of nature and buildings from times past, light and swift brush strokes, suggestive and poetic forms which awaken the sensitive capacity in the observer and invite him to “complete“ and finish off the painting with his own interpretations and to “take a walk“ through it – won Robert popularity and great success. Both as painter and as garden designer, he managed to step out of the topographic, to “raise“ landscape to a level at which it had never been before. To the customers who bought the 29 French authors who wrote on gardens, and which all point out the significance of the role

of the beholder, base their thoughts on the participation of all senses in encompassing na-ture on Étienne Bonnot de Condillac, Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines: ouvrage oú l’réduit à un seul principe tout ce qui concerne l’entendement humain из 1749. On the im-portance of Condillac’s philosophy in creating gardens: B. Wellman-Aron, op. cit., 99-105, 124-129.

mill.23 Watelet’s estate was also visited by queen Marie Antoinette, in order to get ideas for the shaping of the garden at Petit Trianon, an undertaking which employed Robert.

Watelet’s essay and his picturesque garden exerted a great influence on the fashioning of the estate of Ermenonville of the marquis René Louis Girardin. Although the general tone was set by the prominent theoretician of horticulture, its key creator was Robert. He created “pictures“ which opened up in front of the eyes of the visitors and offered contrasts – of the closed and the open, the wild and the tame, the fierce and the gentle. He raised Rousseau’s grave and, as a part of the south “picture“ of the estate, an imitation of Sybil’s temple at Tivoli.24 He was soon to repeat the same “picture“ at chateau Mereville of marquis De Laborde. Mereville, with Robert’s grands tableaux, in which each element of nature was transformed into a series of conceptualized and controlled “natural“ events which fully absorb the beholder, is the most prominent example of the picturesque garden in France (fig. 41).25

Robert turned the ideas of French theoreticians into visual reality. He was subjected to nature, he served as her assistant, la seconder, a demand put before the gardener by Morel.26 Robert represented and created nature, he created both the representation and the reality. He was a true “artist of nature“, her “composer“, as garden designers were called by French theoreticians.27 In painting and in nature he realized an idea which was formulated at a much later date: “Landscape mediates the cultural and the natural...It is not only a natural scene, and not just a representation of a natural scene, but a natural representation of a natural scene, a trace or icon of nature in nature itself...“.28

Robert’s paintings and garden “pictures“ function as places of visual appropriation of the observer and, at the same time, as a space the observer enters and in which he becomes a figure in the landscape. In picturesque gardens space did not only exist in front of the body, it enveloped it, it was both in front and behind, in the past as much as in the future, so that the beholder was the one observing and, simultaneously, the one being observed. With its picturesque effects and manner of positioning of main lines, The Park on the Lake beckons the beholder, that is the passer by, to enter into nature. Passing through it offers a feeling of pleasure. This feeling is rounded off by elements the theoreticians insisted on: edifices integrated with nature and water, which not merely a fitting element of decoration but an embodiment of the dynamic force that naturalizes the artificial and offers an effect of harmonious circulation. This picturesque garden enables reversibility of

23 Ibid., 16-17.24 On that: J. de Cayeux, Hubert Robert et les jardins, 93-101.25 On Robert at Méréville: Ibid., 102-112; J. D. Bandiera, Form and Meaning in Hubert Robert’s

Ruin Caprices: Four Paintings of Fictive Ruins for the Château de Méréville, Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 15/1 (1989), 20-37, 82-85.

26 Jan-Marie Morel, Théorie des jardins, ou l’art des jardins de la Nature, Paris 1776, 95.27 Morel called the gardener an artist and Girardin a composer: Ibid., 24; René Louis Girardin,

De La Composition Des Paysages, ou des moyens d’embellir la Nature autour des Habitations, en joignant l’agréable a l’utile, Paris 1777, 10.

28 W. J. T. Mitchell, Imperial Landscape, in: Landscape and Power, 5-34, 15.

41. Hubert Robert, Le temple de la piété filiale vu d’un pont rustique, dans le parc de Méréville, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen


paintings, as well as to the proprietors of the country estates, he gave through his landscapes a sort of Utopia which inspired various mental and emotional associations. He emphasized his own role as creator of such pictural poetics, as on The Park on the Lake, by representing himself in the act of sketching in the first plane.

Like most of Robert’s paintings, The Park on the Lake is a particular sort of recycling of the artist’s (al)ready-made solutions. For this reason much of his opus was considered uninteresting. While philosophers and men of letters, likeMarcel Proust, enjoyed similar paintings, in particular his representations of the park of St. Cloud (fig. 42), historians of art had neglected them.30 Therefore, many of Robert’s paintings, including the one from Belgrade, remained unnoticed in academic circles. In search of times lost, we “took a walk“ through this work of art. Being guided by historical context, it was enough to let The Park on the Lake enchant us with its serenity, its golden aura, the possibility of allusive, nostalgic and meditative spiritual paths.

30 On Proust and Robert’s paintings: T. Baldwin, The Material Оbject in the Work of Marcel Proust, Bern 2005, 94.

42. Hubert Robert, The Parc of Saint Cloud, 1768, oil on canvas, New Orleans Museum of Art

82 • I M A G I N A R Y G A R D E N S O F H U B E R T R O B E R T B I B L I O G R A P H Y • 83

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88 • I M A G I N A R Y G A R D E N S O F H U B E R T R O B E R T L I S T O F I L L U S T R A T I O N S • 89

32. Hubert Robert, The Portico of a Country Mansion, 1773, oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Lucy Work Hewitt, 1934. Inv. 35.40.2© 2011. Image copyright The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource/Scala, Florence

33. Hubert Robert, Vue d’un parc, le jet d’eau, 1783, oil on canvas, INV7658, Musée du Louvre, Paris, © RMN Musée du Louvre / Daniel Arnaudet / Gérard Blot

34. Hubert Robert, Fontaine sous un portique, oil on canvas, MI1107, Musée du Louvre, Paris, © RMN Musée du Louvre / René-Gabriel Ojéda

35. Hubert Robert, Hubert Robert dessinant un vase antique auprès du Colisée, sanguine, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’archéologie de Besançon, © Besançon, Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie- Cliché Pierre GUENAT. Special thanks to Museum.

36. Hubert Robert, The Park on the Lake, detail, photo: Veljko Ilić

37. The same38. The same39. The same40. The same41. Hubert Robert, Le temple de la piété filiale vu d’un

pont rustique, dans le parc de Méréville, oil on canvas, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen, m. Legs Jules Hédou, 1907, © Musées de la Ville de Rouen. Photographie C. Lancien, C. Loisel

42. Hubert Robert, The Parc of Saint Cloud, 1768, oil on canvas, New Orleans Museum of Art, © New Orleans Museum of Art, Purchase, Edith Rosenwald Stern Fund, 95.312.

1. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, oil on canvas, 1768-1769, National Museum in Belgrade, photo: Veljko Ilić

2. Hubert Robert, The Park on the Lake, 1770-1780, oil on canvas, National Museum in Belgrade, photo: Veljko Ilić

3. Elisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun, Hubert Robert, 1788, oil on canvas, INV3055, Мusée du Louvre, Paris © Мusée du Louvre RMN / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

4. Louis-Nicolas de Lespinasse, Port au Ble et Pont Notre-Dame, 1782, oil on canvas, Musée Carnavalet, Paris © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet

5. Hubert Robert, Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, XV-Rr.2040, 1762, watercolor on paper, © Princess Czartorsky Foundation deposited with the National Museum in Krakow

6. Hubert Robert, Vue du Port de Ripetta, a Rome, 1766, oil on canvas, Ecole Nationale Supérieurе des Beaux-Arts, Paris

7. Augustin Pajou, Hubert Robert, sculpture, marble 1780, Ecole Nationale Supérieurе des Beaux-Arts

8. Hubert Robert, The artist in his studio, 1763-1765, oil on canvas, Museum Boijmans Van Benningen, Rotterdam, © Stichting Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam

9. Hubert Robert, Le ravitaillement des prisonniers a Saint-Lazare, 1794, oil on canvas, Musée Carnavalet, Paris, © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet

10. Hubert Robert, Fantasy inspired by Villa Farnese, 1760, ink and wash, private collection

11. Hubert Robert, The Large Staircase, 1761-65, ink and wash, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, © Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The Edith A. and Percy S. Straus Collection

12. Photograph of the painting Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola made before World War II

13. Pages from the Sales catalog of the Randon de Boisset’s Collection 1777, with Hubert Robert’s paintings

14. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, detail, photo: Veljko Ilić

15. Hubert Robert, Les Lavandières à Charenton, 1774, pen, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’archéologie de Valence, N° Inv.: D. 31. Copyright : Musée de Valence, Musée des beaux-arts et d’archéologie de Valence. Special thanks to Mme Hélène Moulin-Stanislas, Directrice du musée

16. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, detail of the back of the canvas with the inscription on the key stretcher, photo: Veljko Ilić

17. The same18. Château de La Muette, Paris19. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo

Farnese at Caprarola, detail, photo: Veljko Ilić20. The same21. The same22. The same23. The same24. The same25. The same26. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo

Farnese at Caprarola, the back of the canvas with key stretcher, photo: Veljko Ilić

27. Hubert Robert, Staircase of the Park of Palazzo Farnese at Caprarola, detail, photo in the infrared spectrum, photo: Veljko Ilić.

28. The same29. The same30. François Boucher, Le Moulin, Мusée du Louvre,

Paris, 1751, oil on canvas, RF1962 © RMN Musée du Louvre / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

31. Hubert Robert, Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines, 1796, oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris, RF1961-20, © RMN Musée du Louvre / Jean-Gilles Berizzi

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

И Н Д Е К С • 91

INDEX

Адам (Robert Adam), 19Албани (Alessandro Albani), 19Ананоф (Alexandre Ananoff), 40, 52Анго (Jean-Robert Ango), 9, 38ancien régime, 9, 13

Багател (сhâteau de Bagatelle), 62Башомон (Louis Petit de Bachaumont), 21Безансон, 38Бекфорд (William Beckford), 27Беланже (François-Joseph Bélanger), 28Бенедикт XIV, папа, 18Берк (Edmund Burke), 60, 62Блондел (Jean-FranÇois Blondel), 77Боскини (Marco Boschini), 59Буше (François Boucher), 20, 36-44, 52-53, 57, 58

Вазари (Giorgio Vasari), 59Валанс, 29, 40, 70Вателе (Claude-Henri Watelet), 77-78Вато (Antoine Watteau), 58, 75ведута, 32, 59, 75Верне (Joseph Vernet), 20Версај, 14, 23, 76Виже Лебрен (Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun), 25-26Вијен (Joseph Maria Vien), 24вила Фарнезе у Капрароли, 32Винкелман (Johann Joachim Winckelmann), 19Вињола (Giacomо da Vignola), 32Волпато (Giovanni Battista Volpato), 59Волтер (Voltaire), 15вртни дизајн, 75-80

Гилпин (William Gilpin), 59Голдшмит (Léopold Benedict Hayum

Goldschmidt), 42-44Гонкур (Goncourt), браћa, 33гроф Де Волнеј (Comte de Volney), 60гроф Строганов, 29

Д’Анживије (d’Angiviller), 23-28, 76

Де Боасе (Randon de Boisset), 34-37, 40-52Де Бретеј (De Breteuil), судија, 18Де Кејли (de Caylus), 18, 22Де Лаборд (De Laborde), 25, 78Де Марињи (de Marigny), 18Де Монтескје (de Montesquieu), 16Де Пил (Roger de Piles), 14, 59Де Сен Јен (De Saint-Yenne), 15Де Сен Пјер (Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), 61Де Сиреј (de Sireuil), 36-37Де Стенвил (De Stainville), војвода Де Шоазел

(De Choiseul), 17-18Декарт (René Descartes), 76-77Декоа (Roger Dequoy), 52Делафос (Jean Charles Delafosse), 9Делил (Jacques Delille), 26Державин, Гаврил, 29Dessinateur des Jardins du Roi, 23, 76Дидро (Denis Diderot), 16, 21-28, 61-62, 77Дилке (Emily Dilke), 42-44Дифрени (Charles Duffresny), 77Dictionnaire de L’Académie Française, 59

енглески пејзажни „покрет“, 76-77Ерар (Sebastian Érard), 43Ерменонвил (сhâteau de Ermenonville), 78естетика питорескног, 56-65, 75естетика сублимног, 60-61

Жирарден (René Louis Girardin), 78Жирардон (François Girardon), 23

Зофани (Johan Zoffany), 71

Изабеј (Jean Baptiste Isabey), 25јardin anglo-chinois, 77јавно мњење, 16 Јусупов, породица, 29

Каз (Pierre-Jacques Cazes), 17Каје (Jеаn de Cailleux/Cayeux), 31, 37-40, 52капричо (сaprice, capriccio, сaprichoso), 32, 59, 75Кармонтел (Louis Carrogis Carmontelle), 65

92 • I M A G I N A R Y G A R D E N S O F H U B E R T R O B E R T И Н Д Е К С • 93

Катарина II, 29Кент (William Kent), 77Клерисо (Charles-Louis Clerisseau), 19

Кондијак (Étienne Bonnot de Condillac), 79Коста (Guido Antonio Costa), 59Краљевска уметничка академија (Académie Royale

de peinture et de sculpture), 20, 22краљевски вртови, 23, 76

L’Année Littéraire, 21Ла Мијет (сhâteau La Muette), 43-44la poétique des ruines, 61Ла Рошфуко (La Rochefoucauld),

надбискуп Руана, 22La Terreur 1793, 28la vie privée, 27Лабиј-Гијар (Adélaide Labille-Guiard), 25Ланге (Hans W. Lange), 53Ле Нотр (André Le Nôtre), 23, 76Леви (Henry-Michel Lévy), 38Леду (Claude Nicholas Ledoux), 28Лелорен (Louis Joseph Lellorain), 9Леспинас (Louis-Nicolas de Lespinasse), 16Лок (John Lock), 14Лувр, 27-29, 62Луј XIV, 14, 15, 76Луј XV, 18, 43Луј XVI, 15, 23, 44, 76luxe, 27

madame Жофрен (Geofrin), 21, 22maison de plaisance, 23Марија Антоанета

(Marie Antoinette), 23, 43, 44, 76, 78Маријет (Pierre Jean Mariette), 17-22Меревил (chateau de Mereville), 78Милиција (Francesco Milizia), 59Министарство за науку и културу и Репарациона

комисија при Влади ФНРЈ, 31, 53Морел (Jean-Marie Morel), 77-78Moulin-Joli, 77

Народни музеј у Београду, 9-11, 13, 27, 31, 53, 55, 57, 65, 67, 75

Натоар (Charles-Joseph Nattoire), 18неокласицизам, 15, 19, 21, 56noble civilité, 24

опат Пасиоди (l’abbé Paciaudi), 18опат Де Сен-Нон (De Saint-None), 18опат Дибо (l’abbé Dubos), 14-15

Пажу (Augustin Pajou), 25Панини (Giovanni Paolo Panini), 19-20, 57, 60Павлe III, папа, 32рapillotage, 58Париз, 14, 17, 20-25, 43, 62париски салони, 20-24парк Сен Клод (Saint Cloud), 80peinture morale, 16, 62Перне (Jacques Henri Alexandre Pernet), 9petit tableaux, 22Пиранези (Giovanni Battista Piranesi), 60питорескни врт, 75-79питорескни пејзаж, 58-59, 75portraits de fantasie, 25просветитељство, 13-15, 59, 75, 77Пруст (Marcel Proust), 80

Рамбује (сhateau de Rambouillet), 76ратне реституције, 53, 67Револуција 1789, 13, 28, 43, 62Рим, 18-20, 32, 38, 56, 61, 69, 76Рио (Georges Ryaux), 37-38Робер (Hubert Robert)

биографија, 13-29пројектант вртова, 65, 76-80Robert des Ruines, 20-22, 60-62самопрезентација, 21, 25-27

Робеспјер (Robespierre), 28Роза (Salvatorе Rosa), 59Розанбер (Pierre Rosenberg), 33рококо, 13-15, 58-59Русо (Jean Jacques Rousseau), 27, 77, 78

Салон, 15, 16, 20-27, 61, 69сензибилност, 13-14сентимент de la mélancolie, 62Сервандони (Giovanni Nicolano Geronimo

Servandoni), 60сликарство руина, 60-62Слоц (René Michel-Ange Slodtz), 17Со (Anne-Gabrielle Soos), 20

Таравал (Hugues Taraval), 24Топић Мимара, Анте, 53, 67Тусен (François Vincent Toussaint), 16

Фабијани (Martin Fabiani), 52facilité, 26Ферал (Eugène Féral), 37Филип, гроф Д’Артоа (Charles Philippe compte

D’Artois), 23Фонтембло (сhateau de Fontainebleau), 23

Фрагонар (Jean Honoré Fragonard), 18, 25, 38, 58, 61Француска академија у Риму (Académie de France à

Rome), 18, 57, 61француска култура 18. века, 13-17, 59-60француска пикторална традиција, 57-58француска руинистичка традиција, 60француски врт, 76-79

Хитлеров музеј у Линцу, 52-53honnête homme, 24хортикултура, 75-79

Цицерон, 75Collège de Beauvais, 17Collège de Navarre, 17commedia dell’arte, 26conversation pieces, 22, 70

Шал (Charles Michel-Ange Challe), 9

CIP - Каталогизација у публикацијиНародна библиотека Србије, Београд

75.071.1:929 Робер И.75.04(44)”18”069.51:75(497.11)

РОБЕР, Ибер, 1733-1808 Имагинарни вртови Ибера Робера / Саша Брајовић и Татјана Бошњак. - Београд : Народни музеј, 2012 (Београд : Публикум). - 95 стр. : илустр. ; 24 cm. - (Из ризнице Народног музеја ; 5)

Тираж 300. - Напомене и библиографске референце уз текст. - Библиографија: стр. 84-89. - Регистар.

ISBN 978-86-7269-128-31. Брајовић, Саша, 1965- [аутор] 2. Бошњак,Татјана, 1960-2011 [аутор]a) Народни музеј (Београд). Збирка стране уметности b) Робер, Ибер (1733-1808)COBISS.SR-ID 189130252

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