Hubert Robert

Private collection, France (Monsieur R...); 

Sale, Paris, Drouot Richelieu, 20 October 1994, lot 94;

Sale, Paris, Piasa (Picard Audap Solanet & Associés), Drouot Richelieu, 26 June 1998, lot 77;

Where acquired by the present owner

Paris, Galerie Cailleux, Le dessin français de Watteau à Prud’hon, 1951, cat. 126 (exhibition label attached to back of frame; catalogue entry mistakenly describes media as sanguine)

Genre subjects like this are rare in the work of Hubert Robert, and this attractive drawing is a fascinating illustration of the influence of François Boucher (1703-1770) on the young Robert. The mother seen in profile, with her child looking out to the viewer, is closely inspired by Boucher's Virgin and Child, a composition known in two versions, with some differences, one in the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco¹ and the other formerly in the collection of Frank Valle, Houston, Texas.² Boucher had already used the same motif, though in a secular context, when introducing a mother and child as part of the troop of herdsmen and camp followers in the right background of the canvas, 'Halt at the Spring', now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, part of a commission for two paintings executed in 1765 and 1767 for the patron Pierre-Jacques-Onésime Bergeret de Grancourt (1715-1785).³

This intimate and highly finished image depicts the mother and child leaning on the ledge of a rustic window with two large wooden beams, top and bottom. To the left, the ledge is adorned with a pot plant, in front of the open leaded window. An ivy climbs to the right, a compositional device popularized by Dutch artists such as Gerrit Dou (1613-1675).

The catalogue of the 1951 Galerie Cailleux exhibition (see Exhibited) lists a drawing with the same subject and measurements as the present sheet, but gives the medium as red chalk. The presence of the exhibition label on the back of the frame demonstrates, however, that this was indeed the exhibited drawing, and the discrepancy regarding medium can only be due to a cataloguing error. All the same, there must once have been a red chalk drawing by Robert with this composition, as a counterproof taken from it was formerly on the London art market.⁴  

Robert seems to have drawn a number of variations of this type of tranquil domestic subject, perhaps reflecting his own situation following his marriage in 1767. Another drawing of lesser quality, formerly in the David-Weill collection, depicts a washerwoman and two children leaning out of a window to coax a bird into its cage.⁵ 

^1. San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums, inv. no. 57.2; see Alexandre Ananoff, François Boucher, vol. II, Paris 1976, p. 288, no. 662, fig. 1732, and Pierre Rosenberg and Marion C. Stewart, French Paintings 1500-1825, The Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, San Francisco 1987, p. 111, reproduced 

^2. New York, Christie's, 15 January 1988, lot 133; reproduced Rosenberg-Stewart, op. cit., p. 110, fig. 2

^3. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, inv. nos. 71.2; reproduced Ananoff, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 286-288, no. 661, fig. 1722

^4. Sale, London, Christie's South Kensington, 18 April 2000, lot 79

^5. Sale, London, Christie's, 7 July 1998, lot 215