Banditti by a fountain with a statue of abundance, two pyramids beyond

This atmospheric canvas, an early work from Robert’s Roman period, exemplifies the artist’s lifelong engagement with the decay of antiquity. The pyramids, though never seen by the artist in situ, reflect the 'Egyptomania' that flourished in mid-18th-century Rome, where such motifs were accessible via ancient spoils and imperial imitations. Painted in the late 1750s, it reveals the formative influence of Giovanni Battista Piranesi's capricci and Giovan Paolo Panini's theatrical ruins, yet with a more poetic, light-infused sensibility. The classical statuary, silhouetted against the pyramids, evokes both grandeur and loss—an emblematic expression of Robert’s romantic vision of history.

Robert’s classical education at the Jesuit-run Collège de Navarre made him an able Latinist and kindled his fascination with the ancient world. But it was his 1754 journey to Rome in the entourage of the French Ambassador, the Comte de Stainville (later Duc de Choiseul), that immersed him in the ruins that became his lifelong obsession and earned him the sobriquet Robert des Ruines. During his eleven-year stay, he met Fragonard, Piranesi, and Panini, and was commissioned by the Abbé de Saint-Non to document antiquities—Egyptian, Greek, and Roman—for the Abbé’s influential guidebooks on Italy.