Imaginary view of a hall with antique statues in the Palazzo dei Conservatori, Rome, with visitors

Active in Rome between 1759 and 1772, Jean-Robert Ango became acquainted with the pensionnaires at the Académie de France, such as Fragonard and Hubert Robert. Best known for his numerous copies after the masters and the antique, the present drawing depicts the inner courtyard of the Palazzo dei Conservatori, housed since 1736 in the Capitoline Museum in Rome, founded by Pope Clement VII.
The present work is close in composition and in style with a larger counterproof by Ango dated 1762 featuring the same room in the Capitoline Museum where a draughtsman is seen, seated in the centre of the gallery, executing a copy after a standing Minerva flanked by two draped sculptures (inv. 1979.224; Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge; see Il Fragonard. Il Robert a Roma, exhib. cat., Rome, Villa Medici, Accademia di Francia a Roma, 1990-1991, p. 252, no. 179). Both the motif of the shell in the alcove and the Egyptian statues feature in the present counterproof and the one at Harvard, but seen from a different angle.There is an almost identical drawing by Hubert Robert which may be dating from to the same time in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valence (inv. D 80. C 28; see Hubert Robert. Promenades au XVIIIe siècle, exhib. cat., Avignon, Musée Angladon, 2010, no. 15, ill.).