Hubert Robert

With Didier Aaron, Paris, 2000;
From whom purchased by the present owners. 

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. The condition of this work is very good, particularly for a picture of this scale by this artist. It may not have been very recently cleaned. The original canvas is made of two sections joined horizontally through the bottom of the large set of steps. This join has become slightly unstable over time and has received retouches along most of it. The lighter colors are in beautiful condition. The sky shows only a very few retouches addressing a little thinness in the darker colors. The trees and the column are in lovely condition. It is only the darkest colors in the architecture that seem to have received some retouches. Some of these restorations have darkened over time, and these are clearly visible in the stone steps. Ideally, one would clean the picture to remove these discolored retouches, particularly in the steps, as they are broadly applied and probably do not address any real damage.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The grand view of a multilevel staircase is most probably imaginary, and composed from a conflation of motifs inspired by drawings made by Robert, especially from his years in Rome. Robert returned to his native Paris in 1765 after an eleven-year sojourn in Italy and many similar works in this vein of architectural and garden capricci are inspired by the numerous studies he made of the gardens, palaces and villas in and around Rome. The compositional design, with an obelisk set to the right of a central staircase and a sturdy building attached at left, was undertaken by Robert on a few occasions. A similarly sized example is now in the Hermitage, St. Petersburg ¹. Another very similar composition, formerly in the collection of the Marquis de Ganay, shows the staircase of the Capitol in Rome, together with a similarly placed (but imaginary) obelisk and a distant view of Saint Peter's.²  The Hermitage painting is generally dated to the early 1780s, and a similar dating is plausible for the present work.

This work along with the following lot, an identically sized canvas of similar bucolic theme and technical execution, may have been originally commissioned as part of a cohesive decorative scheme for a private patron. Robert’s mastery of large scale landscape decorations, where fantasy was ably blended with topographical or classical architectural elements drawn from his experiences in Italy, had won him patronage of royalty and numbers of wealthy private clients. Among his more notable commissions of this type were the set of four pictures painted for the Comte d'Artois, later Charles X, in 1778 for Bagatelle near Paris, the four large canvases executed for the dining room of the Château de Méréville in 1788 (Art Institute, Chicago), and another four painted for Louis XVI for the Château at Fontainebleau in the previous year (Louvre, Paris). Robert's success was particularly notable in Russia, where he painted, for example, a series of large-scale works for Catherine the Great and also her son the Grand Duke Paul at his palace at Petrovsk. The theme of waterfalls and cascades was a favorite of the artist’s, and was often based from his experiences of the great falls at Tivoli in Italy; another even larger canvas in this vein, for example, painted in 1774 and later in the collection of Baron de Cassin, was with Wildenstein in New York in 1988.³

1. Inv. 5857. Canvas, 212 by 208 cm. see I.S. Nemilova,The Hermitage. Catalogue of Western European Painting. French Painting, Eighteenth Century,Moscow 1986, p. 283, cat. no. 206, reproduced.
2. Paris, Georges Petit, 8-10 May 1922, lot 64.
3. J. Stourton, Great Collectors of our time. Art collecting since 1945, London 2007, pp. 34-36.