It was in the studio of the sculptor Michel-Ange Slodtz that Hubert Robert first developed the desire to travel to Rome, a journey then regarded by artists as a formative and indispensable stage in any successful career. Under the protection of Étienne François, Duke of Choiseul, then French ambassador in Rome, he was admitted to the French Academy and remained in Italy from 1754 to 1765. During these eleven years, he undertook numerous excursions throughout the Roman Campagna in the company of Jean-Claude Richard de Saint-Non and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, experiences that proved decisive in the development of his artistic imagination.
Two distinct scenes, yet subtly linked to one another, are presented here. Beneath the monumental arch of a bridge—reminiscent of the architectural visions of Giovanni Battista Piranesi—washerwomen are gathered along the banks of a watercourse. On the opposite shore, a fisherman converses in the half-light with a peasant woman collecting water. Beyond, a waterfall pours forth its turbulent waters, whose freshness and power seem to permeate the very atmosphere of the scene.
Probably conceived as a pair, owing to their identical dimensions and the consistency of their pictorial treatment, these remarkable paintings provide a brilliant demonstration of Hubert Robert’s mastery in the depiction of classical monuments, a talent that earned him the sobriquet “Robert des Ruines” (Robert of the Ruins), bestowed by Catherine II. Beyond their apparent differences, the two compositions are founded upon the same constructive logic. Each is organised around lateral light sources and a clearly articulated network of diagonal lines, which structure the space in depth and lend the ensemble its remarkable coherence.
In the riverside scene, the light, entering from the left and filtered through the architecture, animates the surface of the water with shifting reflections. In keeping with the spirit of the Enlightenment, this renewed attention to natural phenomena reflects an almost scientific observation of the visible world: the waterfall breaks into a multitude of streams, creating a mist-laden atmosphere in which the water, initially white and foaming, gradually becomes crystalline before taking on green and amber tones, coloured by the rocky and vegetated riverbed beneath. The female figures, with their gently idealised grace, recall the legacy of François Boucher, whose delicacy of line and refinement of silhouette Robert echoes here. The figure seen from behind finds a particularly close parallel in The Halt at the Fountain (1765, oil on canvas, 35 x 44 cm, Zurich, Bührle Foundation inv. 122)
In the composition depicting the ancient ruins, the landscape is structured by a diagonal rise of ground that separates a terrestrial foreground, rich in warm brown tones, from an upper zone opening onto a luminous sky against which the ancient monuments stand in silhouette. The eye moves freely through the scene, guided both by the light and by a succession of figures arranged along a sinuous path that leads from the foreground into the furthest reaches of the composition.
This poetic evocation of ruins bears witness to the profound fascination that Antiquity exerted upon artists and collectors of the period. The excavations of Herculaneum, begun as early as 1738, followed by those of Pompeii from 1748 onward, revealed to Enlightenment Europe an ancient heritage of unprecedented richness, providing a lasting source of inspiration for painters of ruins.
The low viewpoint, which places the spectator close to the ground, recalls the practice of drawing directly from nature encouraged by Charles-Joseph Natoire among the pensionnaires of the French Academy in Rome. Sketchbook and charcoal in hand, they roamed the Roman Campagna, pausing to record monuments and figures, often while seated on the ground, which could later be reused and recomposed, sometimes many years after their initial execution. Although the present paintings bear the date 1776, a decade after Hubert Robert’s return to France, they belong to a period when the artist was working primarily for an aristocratic clientele and on major private decorative commissions. His studio practice then relied extensively on the reuse of drawings made in Italy, which he adapted and combined as required to create new compositions. This working method also explains the presence of references drawn from his own repertory, enriched by broader borrowings from Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Giovanni Paolo Panini, Claude Joseph Vernet, and François Boucher.
The two paintings are thus not isolated works within the production of Hubert Robert, but belong to a broader corpus of variations and reworkings of established motifs. The scene beneath the bridge finds a particularly close counterpart in View towards the Mediterranean Coast from the Arch of a Bridge with Washerwomen [1] , while the composition devoted to ancient monuments shows clear affinities with The Monuments of Rome [2] , as well as with a 1774 watercolour in the Albertina Museum (inv. 17426), where the same principle of articulation between ancient architecture, figures, and diagonal terrain is already present.
By contrast, the very idea of conceiving these two scenes as a pendant may originate in the large decorative ensembles executed between 1773 and 1775 for Archbishop Dominique de La Rochefoucauld, intended for the Salle des États of the archiepiscopal palace in Rouen. This programme comprised views of the ports of Normandy as well as four overdoor paintings inspired by the artist’s Italian travels: Monuments and Ruins (formerly known as Ruins of Italy), The Cascades of Tivoli (formerly A Waterfall among the Rocks), Seascape at Sunset (formerly Seaport at Sunrise), and a second Monuments and Ruins (formerly A Staircase and an Obelisk). These works are today preserved in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rouen (inv. SR 62–65).
Within this context, it is reasonable to suppose that Robert, as early as the following year, in 1776, selected and isolated two motifs from this decorative repertory in order to recombine them as an autonomous pair. The compositions were adapted to a format of 82 × 123 cm, while certain figurative elements were rearranged, notably through the transfer of the male figure seen from behind—originally positioned before the bridge—to the scene of the ruins.
In these works, Robert develops an aesthetic of the picturesque, later theorised by William Gilpin in Three Essays on Picturesque Beauty (1782), in contrast to the categories of the sublime formulated by Edmund Burke. The painterly handling plays a full part in achieving this effect: broad and enveloping in the skies, denser in the terrestrial passages, the brushwork creates a warm and harmonious atmosphere that already anticipates certain pre-Romantic sensibilities.
The more carefully defined passages, reserved for the details of faces, draperies, and architectural profiles, reveal both the depth of the artist’s compositional thought and the presence of a firmly structured preparatory design. The palette, rich and nuanced, combines deep browns, the luxuriant greens of the vegetation, and the ochres of the monuments, enlivened by brighter accents—notably the red of a garment or a floral motif—which punctuate the composition and subtly animate its visual rhythm.
Hubert Robert’s success rests precisely on his ability to create an immersive visual experience, intended to enrich aristocratic interiors and rendered all the more effective by the relatively large scale of his compositions. The indifference of the figures to the grandeur of the monuments that dominate them establishes a subtle contrast between the everyday nature of the activities depicted and a broader meditation on the permanence of the human condition. The washerwomen, modern reinterpretations of figures drawn from the mythological imagery associated with water, fulfil this function by opening the reading of the scene to multiple temporal dimensions, while human existence unfolds within a nature that is at once monumental and eternal.
At certain points, however, some figures suspend their activity in moments of contemplative epiphany: a male figure seen from behind, a resting dog, or a traveller pausing before a monument—a motif that also appears in a drawing in the Department of Graphic Arts of the Musée du Louvre. These figures, true intermediaries of the gaze, serve as points of identification for the viewer and contribute to that sense of restrained wonder so characteristic of Hubert Robert’s imaginative and poetic world.
The artist’s achievement lies not in the perfect and faithful architectural depiction worthy of a Panini, but in the virtuoso rendering of vivid scenes of everyday life unfolding amidst the ruins of the Eternal City.
Prestigious both in their conception and in their provenance, these two canvases were once owned by distinguished collectors, notably the Comte de Reilhac and the banker and diplomat Octave Marie Joseph Kérim Homberg. Having passed through the international art market, they have been reunited within the same French private collection since the 1990s. Owing to their remarkable state of preservation and the quality of their execution, they constitute a significant testament to Hubert Robert’s art, demonstrating his ability to transform the memory of travel into a vision suspended between ruins, nature and everyday life—a world both real and imagined, in which the pleasure of contemplation is continually renewed.
D. G.
