A monumental landscape with a waterfall by Hubert Robert

In 1754, Hubert Robert set off for Rome under the patronage of the Count of Stainville, the French ambassador and future Duke of Choiseul. Hubert Robert spent eleven years in Italy, in the company of Fragonard and the Abbé de Saint-Non. He returned to France in 1765, having already established a solid reputation as a landscape painter, and was admitted to the Royal Academy in the very same year of his return.

He subsequently produced numerous works based on the sketches he had brought back from Italy. Alongside this body of work, inspired by his Italian memories, he also produced depictions of Paris and its surroundings, as well as Gallo-Roman buildings. Hubert Robert was probably the first artist to take such a close interest in France’s ancient ruins: the Pont du Gard, the Maison Carrée in Nîmes, the amphitheatre in the city of Orange…From the 1770s onwards, following the fashion for English gardens, the artist produced numerous landscapes of the areas around Paris, at Ermenonville, at Marly…

The painting was commissioned from the artist by Pierre Jacques Onésyme Bergeret de Grancourt, Commissioner-General of Finances in Montauban, a great art lover and collector, and an associate member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. Fragonard and Bergeret appear to have been acquainted since the artist’s return to France. Subsequently, from 1773 to 1774, the painter accompanied the art lover on two journeys across Europe, to Flanders and Holland, then to Italy and on to Vienna, Prague and Dresden. At the posthumous sale of Bergeret’s estate, nine paintings and numerous drawings by Fragonard were included.

The neglected gardens of the Villa d’Este in Tivoli, where Hubert Robert stayed in the summer of 1760, left a lasting impression on him with their picturesque charm. He produced numerous paintings based on the cascatelle of Tivoli, but none reached such monumental proportions. For example, the painting in the Pau Museum of Fine Arts, dated 1768 – ten years earlier – is less than a metre wide, whilst the one held at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, dated 1776, is even more modest in size. In both paintings, the foreground scene is picturesque, featuring local figures going about their daily activities.

In the painting held in Maisons, the artist has created a monumental composition that juxtaposes stillness and movement. The waters of the Tivoli waterfall cascade over the rocks, bringing a turbulent vitality to this landscape beneath a threatening sky. In the distance, the arched bridge—which is not unlike the one on the Gard—and the towering mountains evoke a setting that is immutable within the order of nature, yet more fragile within the realm of human constructions. A contrast between a civilisation destined for destruction and time captured within the realm of nature, in perpetual flux.

In the foreground, bathed in golden light, three figures provide a sense of human scale within this grandiose scene. The work was acquired in 1988 for the Château de Maisons under the title ‘Landscape with a waterfall viewed by Huber Robert, his wife and his valet ’. The man, with a drawing pad under his arm, could indeed be the painter himself, all the more so as his signature appears on the pad. He appears to be lost in thought whilst the couple point excitedly at the scene: are they Bergeret and Robert’s wife?

The scene embodies the charm of a moment captured in time. Hubert Robert departs from the humanist tradition of the ‘poetics of ruins’, which is a meditation on history. The latter is no longer essential to the development of a ‘poetics of ruins’, which, in Robert’s work, is more akin to the poetics of human time and nature—of that which is in perpetual flux, and of that which also threatens, like a storm. A dreamer and lyricist, Denis Diderot exclaims in his *Salons* of 1767 regarding the painter: ‘Everything is destroyed, everything perishes, everything passes. Only the world remains. Only time endures. How old this world is! I walk between two eternities.” Denis Diderot understood that Robert was evoking an “old world” on the verge of being shaken by history.

As for the painter’s distinctive style, Denis Diderot was able to describe it with precision as early as 1767: ‘The air is thick, the light laden with the vapour of cool places and with the minute particles that visible darkness enables us to discern; and then the brushwork is so gentle, so soft, so sure! It is a marvellous effect produced without effort. One does not think of art; one simply admires, and it is the very admiration one accords to nature itself.” On closer inspection, one can indeed discern a mellow brushstroke, no rigidity of perspective, and atmospheric effects rendered by blended brushstrokes.

Fragonard and the Italian Journey (1773–1774): The Bergeret Family: Patrons of the Arts, exhibitioncatalogue , L’Isle-Adam, Louis-Senlecq Museum of Art and History, 20 May–30 September 2001 / [edited by Frédéric Chappey]

Hubert Robert 1733–1808. A Visionary Painter, exhibition catalogue, Musée du Louvre, Paris, 9 March 2016 to 30 May 2016, and at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, 26 June to 2 October 2016.