Hubert Robert and Jean-Robert Ango

Probably estate sale of Hubert Robert, Paris, Maître Paillet et Olivier 5 April 1809 (according to a pencil inscription on the backing sheet: Doit provenir de la vente Robert en 1809);

Hippolyte Destailleur (1822-1893), Paris;

Louis Deglatigny (1854-1936), Rouen (L.1768a),

His sale, Paris, Hôtel Drouot, 14-15 June 1937, as part of lot 216 (as Etudes de figures dessinées en Italie);

Sale, Paris, Palais Galliera, 9 December 1967, lot 7;

Sale, Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hôtel des Ventes de Neuilly (Claude Aguttes), 27 June 2003, lot 10;

With Galerie Didier Aaron, Paris;

From whom acquired by the present owner, 2007.

Paris, Galerie Didier Aaron, 2004, no. 15.

These figure studies were once part of the same album, assembled by Robert himself, as those in the previous lot. The album was later dismembered, and a part of it was dispersed in the 1937 sale of the collection of Louis Deglatigny (see Provenance). Though these composite sheets are generally entirely composed of figure studies by Robert himself, he has here also included, lower right, three figures drawn by his associate and follower, Jean-Robert Ango. These studies, drawn on two sheets of paper, are smaller in scale than the studies by Robert that they accompany, and are vigorously executed in red chalk, in Ango's characteristic style. They depict a beggar seen kneeling in profile to the left alongside a standing youth, and a figure, possibly a cleric, in profile, walking to the right. Ango worked in Rome between 1759 and 1770. Though he had no official affiliation with the Académie de France he frequented and befriended several of the pensionniares. He often copied their drawings and reworked their counterproofs, especially the works by Robert and Fragonard (1732-1806). Ango became well known and appreciated by French collectors and amateurs in Rome for his finished copies after famous paintings or drawings by revered artists, works from which he made a handsome living. Indeed, Charles-Joseph Natoire, who was appointed Director of the Académie de France in Rome in 1751, owned 'plus de cent dessins d'Ango d'après les plus grands maîtres de l'Ecole d'Italie' ('more than one hundred drawings by Ango after the most important Masters of the Italian School)¹, and in 1765 Jacques-Laure Le Tonnelier, Bailli de Breteuil and Ambassador to the order of Malta (1723-1785), employed Ango to record all the works in his collection. 

Both these composite sheets of drawings offer an interesting insight into Robert's working method, demonstrating how he used these figures, clearly drawn from life, as reference materials for future works - much in the spirit of the pattern books that were central to the activities of any Italian renaissance artist's workshop.  

See also the previous lot.

¹ M. Roland Michel, Le Dessin Français au XVIII^e Siecle, Fribourg 1987, p. 85