This small, charming panel by Hubert Robert is a fine display of the artist’s quirky sense of humor and gift for architectural capriccio. Figures in both contemporary costume and antique garb walk up and down a vast stone staircase leading toward an enormous church that could only have existed in Robert’s imagination. First, we see a large colonnaded porch of classical order and Tuscan design, fronting a Catholic church (there is a tiny cross at its pinnacle) built in the style of a Roman basilica, but topped with a characteristically French Gothic window; behind this strange structure rise the Gothic towers of what appears to be yet another, altogether different church of another age and place.
This architectural caprice strongly resembles the real, but almost equally fantastical, house of Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737-1814), author of the celebrated novel Paul et Virginie (1788), as it appears in a painting by Robert that was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, 26 May 2016, lot 86. The house, in Essonnes, was designed by the visionary architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux and was the site of the wedding in 1793 of Bernardin de Saint-Pierre to the daughter of the publisher, Pierre-François Didot.
The circular format of the present painting, as well as its small scale, associates it with the series of remarkable works that Robert executed in 1793-94, when he was a prisoner of the Revolution and, in the absence of available canvas, was forced to paint on the inside of the small ceramic soup bowls from which he took his meals; indeed, the rapid and liquid brushwork of the present lot is characteristic of Robert’s manner of painting circa 1795-1800.
A drawing by Robert in red chalk of the same fantastical church that appears in the present painting was with Galerie Cailleux in Paris in the 1970s (see the exhibition catalogue Sanguines: dessins francais du dix-huitieme siècle, 1978, no. 47), and a counterproof of that sheet, reworked in pen and watercolors and signed ‘Robert’, was in the sale of the collection of François Coty (Paris, 30 November 1936, lot 14).
We are grateful to Joseph Baillio for endorsing the attribution to Hubert Robert following firsthand inspection of the painting, and for his assistance in preparing this entry.
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