Hubert Robert View of the Portico of the Pantheon Red chalk PROVENANCE Robert moved to Rome in 1754, having won a place at the Académie Francaise. The influential director of the Académie, Charles-Joseph Natoire, encouraged his pupils to make drawings and paintings en plein air, using the city and its buildings, ruins and inhabitants as models. During the twelve years of his residency in Rome, Robert produced a mass of drawings that explored every aspect of the city and its environs, providing an almost unequalled insight into the appearance and character of the place. These studies are notable for their lack of formality. They included not only the grand monuments of Rome's past, as in this drawing of the portico of the Pantheon, but also contemporary details of everyday urban life, very often combining the two. In 1762, the same year as this sheet, Robert created a number of large-scale views of Rome. This suggests he was engaged in a conscious effort to emulate the achievement of earlier artists, such as Giambattista Piranesi, who notably made landscape and veduta drawings in red chalk, and was a towering figure in the Roman artistic scene. In his choice of medium, Robert may also have been influenced by his brilliant young associate, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, who arrived at the Académie two years after him, in 1756, and who became his close friend and artistic companion. Robert's first datable essays in red chalk were undertaken the next year, in 1757. The two artists often drew the same views from virtually the same location, and their styles at that time seemed almost identical. Robert and Fragonard achieved a level of skill in the use of red chalk to describe landscape that has rarely been surpassed. |
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