'La Récitation': An interior with a child reciting to her mother

The present drawing, depicting a young girl reciting her lessons before her mother, is almost certainly connected to a lost painting, Une petite fille récitant sa leçon devant sa mère, that was exhibited in Paris in 1773 (no. 99) with its pendant, Un enfant que sa bonne fait dejeuner; the latter has survived and is generally known as Mange, Mon Petit (Veil-Picard collection, Paris; see the exhibition catalogue Hubert Robert/Louis Moreau, Galerie Cailleux, Paris, 1957, illustrated on the cover). When the paintings were first shown at the Salon, critics observed that their subject matter -- unexpected from Robert -- was "in the taste of Lepicie"; we might also detect in them a tribute to the style and subject matter popularized a generation earlier by Chardin. According to Henriot (loc. cit.), at least one contemporary critic, Daudet de Jossan, suggested that Robert's principal model was his wife, the former Anne-Gabrielle Soos (1745-1821), whom Robert wed in July 1767. If so, the present composition very likely reflects the artist's family life at this period, as Carlson (loc. cit.) has noted, and the little student would probably have been modelled on Robert's first child, Gabrielle-Charlotte (b. 1768), who was four or five years old at the time the drawing was made. A drawing executed in a similar medium, Young Woman Seated before a Fireplace, Playing with a Baby (Morgan Library, New York; see ibid., no. 38), may have been an early study -- before Robert settled on his final composition -- for Mange, Mon Petit.