For a long time the Revolutionary paintings of the great landscape painter, Hubert Robert, "Robert des ruines", were dismissed as mere essays in composition, which had little to say about his personal convictions. It tended to be assumed that Robert's past royal and aristocratic patrons made him a covert partisan of the Ancien régime. However, in 1989 a major exhibition, "Robert et la Révolution" began a process of reappraisal which is still ongoing (see bibliography below)
Robert's commitment to Revolutionary principles now seems clear. Despite his dangerous ties with the Crown and the nobility, he consistently refused to emigrate, and in 1791 declined Catherine the Great's offer of a safe haven in the Russian Court. In 1793 he was admitted into the Revolutionary Commune Générale des Arts. He stoically endured imprisonment between 29th October 1793 and 5th August 1794. Although he avoided public office, he was involved in the work of transforming the Grande Galerie of the Louvre into a public museum. This project was begun before 1789, but Robert saw it as an essentially Revolutionary endeavour. It obsessed him; he painted the gallery at least ten times between 1789 and 1799, including his famous image of the space in a imagined future state of ruin. His depictions of the Revolution rework the themes of official iconography and can legitimately be read as straightforward commemorations of Revolutionary events.
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| Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie en ruine (1796) Louvre http://www.louvre.fr/oeuvre-notices/vue-imaginaire-de-la-grande-galerie-du-louvre-en-ruine |
The Bastille in the first days of its demolition (1789)
In the Salon of 1789 Robert exhibited a small canvas depicting the demolition of the Bastille. Pierre Demachy later painted the same theme. The heightened scale of the building exaggerates its impact. The onlookers in the foreground are passive observers of change rather than active participants. The picture excited little comment at the time - it was praised for its veracity by one reviewer but criticised by another as too "agreeable", that is it conformed too closely to the conventional rules of the picturesque to give justice to the full horror of the Bastille.
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| La Bastille dans les prémiers jours de sa demolition (1789) Musée Carnavalet http://www.carnavalet.paris.fr/en/collections/la-bastille-dans-les-premiers-jours-de-sa-demolition |
Vivian P. Cameron "Reflections on violence and the crowd in the images of the French Revolution",
Imagining the French Revolution [American Historical Assn. digital project]
https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/imaging/essays/cameron2.html
The "Day of the Wheelbarrows" and the Festival of the Federation (1790)
Robert's painting of the Fête de la Fédération of 1790, now at Versailles, hung in the salon of La Fayette's château de Lagrange and was possibly commissioned by him. In 2012 a second version was sold at auction together with a pendant La journée des brouettes (the Day of the Wheelbarrows) which depicts Parisians spontaneously coming to the assistance of workers who are preparing the Champ-de-Mars. Both occasions were key elements in official Revolutionary iconography.
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| La journée des brouettes (the Day of the Wheelbarrows) |
La Fête de la Fédération Nationale, le 14 juillet 1790, au Champ-de-Mars
http://www.photo.rmn.fr/archive/07-504855-2C6NU0C7OEC8.html
Christie's 16 April 2012. "Comte and Comtesse, Niel, a shared passion" SALE 3529 LOT 78
http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/paintings/hubert-robert-la-journee-des-brouettes-et-5549584-details.aspx
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| La journée des brouettes (detail) |
The Violation of the Tombs of the Kings in the Basilica of Saint-Denis (1793)
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| La violation des caveaux des rois dans la basilique de Saint-Denis en octobre 1793 http://www.carnavalet.paris.fr/fr/collections/la-violation-des-caveaux-des-rois-dans-la-basilique-de-saint-denis-en-octobre-1793 |
Charlotte DENOËL, "Le vandalisme révolutionnaire", L'Histoire par l'image
http://www.histoire-image.org/site/oeuvre/analyse.php?i=88
Of all Robert's Revolutionary paintings, this depiction of the dismemberment of the royal crypt is the hardest to accept - surely the artist, with his love of antiquity, must have regretted such an act of vandalism? If so, there is nothing in the picture itself to really suggest this; the busy workmen merely go about their task or contemplate the scene tranquilly, with the vaults of the ancient basilica soaring impressively above them.
Bibliography
The
catalogue of the exhibition Hubert Robert et la Révolution, held
at Valence in 1989, is impossible to access or even buy in hard copy. It
is reviewed Katie Scott in The Burlington
Magazine Vol. 132, No. 1048 (Jul., 1990), pp. 500-501. According to
this review, the organisers tended to assume that Robert was hostile or
ambivalent towards the Revolutionary enterprise and left the interpretation of
his Revolutionary works unresolved:
"Despite
the stated aims of the exhibition, first to ascertain whether the Revolution
effected both a break in the painter's career and a dislocation in his work
(p.11) and second to judge the qualitative effect of this caesura (p.27) the
interpretative enterprise is often compromised by the organisers' obvious
confusion faced with pictures seemingly empty of partisanship (p.25), yet
executed by an artist who had invested in the ancien régime more
deeply than most (p.20). The apparent absence of a coherent and
conspicuous ideology in Robert's work leads Boulot to treat many of his
images...as transparent and neutral evidence of little more than anecdotal
value (p.79, nos. 20, 25)".
On
JStor: http://www.jstor.org/stable/884290
Paula
Rea Radisich, Hubert Robert : painted spaces of the Enlightenment (C.U.P.1998)
Reviewed
by Christopher Johns, http://www.caareviews.org/reviews/283
"Radisich’s
excellent book concludes with a thoughtful coda titled “Hubert Robert and the
Revolution.” Its brevity leaves the reader a bit disappointed and wanting to
know more, although it is undeniably another book project in and of itself.
Centered on Robert’s incarceration during the last days of the Terror, Radisich
points to this uncertain period as profoundly reformative, in the artistic and
psychological sense, for the last years of Robert’s professional activity. The
enigmatic Young Girls Dancing around an Obelisk painted in 1798, along with the
celebrated Grand Gallery of the Louvre pendants, are identified as political
and cultural metaphors of alienation and ambiguity, and the author rightly
declines to discuss them in specific terms. Still, these works resonate with a
sense of catastrophic devastation that must visualize the profoundly troubled
state of mind the disintegration of the Enlightenment posed to an artist of
Hubert Robert’s sensibilities. Radisich sagely concludes that the ruin of the
cosmopolitan, cultivated and civilized world of the Enlightenment is proclaimed
in Young Girls Dancing around an Obelisk. Possibly inspired by
Bonaparte’s imperialist ambitions in Egypt, the new world order of Napoleonic
nationalism and military adventurism are not far behind."
Nina
L. Dubin, Futures and Ruins: Eighteenth-century Paris and the
art of Hubert Robert (2010)
The
American scholar Frédérique Baumgartner has recently emphasised Robert's
Revolutionary credentials:
See
"Two
rediscovered paintings by Hubert Robert and their French Revolutionary
context"
Burlington
Magazine vol. 1555 May 2013
According to Baumgartner Robert was "not a simple witness of the
Revolution but a critical commentator on revolutionary events, conscious of the
ideals of 1790 and anxious to transmit them.
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