Hubert Robert

M. Saget, Tours;
His (anonymous) sale, Paris Hôtel Drouot, 14 March 1910, lot 8;
There acquired by Lennie Davis;
Possibly Comte Legendre d'Onzembray, Château de Villemereuil, Aube;
Possibly Etienne Marie Antoine Champion, Comte de Nansouty, Paris;
Comte and Comtesse de la Béraudière, Paris;
With Edouard Jonas, Paris, by 1928;
Mrs. I.D. Levy, later Mrs. Joseph D. Heine, New York;
Her sale, New York, Parke-Bernet Galleries, 24-25 November 1944, lot 257, to E. Holt for $7,000;
Mrs. C. Lockhart McKelvy, Perrysburg, Ohio;
By whom given to the Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio in 1945 (Acc. no. 45.24);
By whom sold, New York, Christie's, 6 June 1984, lot 94;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 11 December 1985, lot 87;
There acquired by a private collector, New York;
By whom anonymously sold ("Property of a New York Private Collector"), New York, Sotheby's, 29 January 2016, lot 541;
There acquired. 

"French 17th-18th Century Oil Paintings Acquired Since 1939," in Museum News, The Toledo Museum of Art, III, No. 4, Autumn 1969, pp. 74, 94;
The Toledo Museum of Art: European Paintings, Toledo 1976, p. 395, reproduced;
C. Burgard, in Le Paysage et la question du sublime, exhibition catalogue, Valence 1997, p. 231, under cat. no. 38 (erroneously lists date as 1793).

This painting belongs to a set of four Italianate landscapes executed by Robert in 1795.  All four belonged to Mrs. Joseph D. Heine (see Provenance) and were included in the sale of her property in New York in 1944.  The paintings, which were sold as separate lots, were acquired in that sale by the same buyer and separated shortly thereafter, as the present work alone was given to the Toledo Museum of Art the following year.

The Ponte Lucano, a graceful arched bridge spaning the Aniene River, is located about two miles from Tivoli.  The bridge was built in the 1st century B.C. by M. Plautius Lucanus and served the road from Tivoli to Rome until the mid-20th century.  The cylindrical structure seen at far right is the tomb of the Plautian family.  The mausoleum was built by Marcus Plautius Silvanus, a friend of Caesar Augustus and consul in 2 B.C.  Externally covered in blocks of travertine stone, it was much restored during the Middle Ages.

This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Hubert Robert being prepared with the assistance of the Wildenstein Institute.