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A river landscape with an artist sketching beneath a ruined temple, possibly the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli

(1733 to 1808 France)

Colnaghi

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probably The Marquise de Broc; probably the Comtesse de Lantivy; Anon. sale (Madame X), Paris, Galerie Georges Petit (Maitre Henri Baudoin), 6-7 December 1926, lot 120 illustrated); Georges Wildenstein & Co.; Leonard Koetser, London; with Colnaghi, London, from whom purchased by a private collector in 2000.

probably Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, Five Centuries of European Painting, 1933, no. 35.

This beautifully painted classical landscape was probably painted by Hubert Robert in the late 1770s, drawing upon the artist’s earlier experiences of Italy, which he had visited as a young man. The prominent temple on the right of the composition with its Corinthian columns is undoubtedly inspired by the famous Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli outside Rome, although Robert has taken considerable liberties with the surrounding landscape, which is much gentler and more low-lying than the rugged environs of Tivoli. Robert visited Tivoli during the summer of 1760, which he spent with Fragonard and the Abbé de Saint-Non in a villa rented by his patron. There he made numerous drawings of the site, a good example of which is today in Valence, Musée des Beaux-Arts. Tivoli remained one of his favourite motifs and was incorporated into many of Robert's paintings after his return to Paris in 1765. The most spectacular of these is probably the enormous canvas of 1779 now in the Château de Maisons-Lafitte in France. Many of Robert's reminiscences of Tivoli and other classical sites incorporated figures of artists sketching, although rarely in the fancy costumes shown here. The two artists are dressed in seventeenth-century costume with slashed sleeves and this may reflect the contemporary taste for exotic 'Spanish' dress advocated by Robert's patron Madame Geoffrin . Similarly Robert's works in this vein often contain humorous or pointed references to the decay and abandoned fate of many classical ruins, and here the temple itself is clearly used as a byre, from which the cattle are shown leaving for pasture. This was not entirely fanciful, for as Robert's own drawings clearly show, the spaces below the Temple of the Sibyl itself were also used as a hay barn and the Colisseum itself was used as a pasture for grazing cattle (the Campo Vacino) until the early nineteenth century.

Although a chronology for Robert's works is notoriously difficult to establish, a capriccio of 1779 of similar design and likewise including the Temple of the Sibyl is in the Louvre . This painting, which is similar in the overall lines of the composition, shows a group of young women to the left in front of a statue of abundance, while below the temple itself is a figure fishing from a stream. The fact the the young woman leaning over a rustic parapet is found in bust form in a watercolour of the Villa Pamphilj with Roman Ruins (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1774) lends further support to this dating and the same figure recurrs in The Wandering Minstrels of 1779, one of a series of six large canvasses commssioned by the comte d’Arthois for Bagatelle, now in the Metroplotian Museum, New York. The old shepherd with the wide-brimmed, upward turning hat and envelopingg cloak appears in a younger guise in a black chalk drawing of 1767-1775 in the Musee des Beaux Arts, Valence.. . Furthermore the treatment of the umbrella pinis identical with that of the same tree in Ruins with Water, one of a series of four large canvasses exhibited at the Salon of 1779 and later in the Youssoupov collection. These correspondances suggest that this charming picture was probably executed by Robert in the late 1770s.