Lot Essay
Hubert Robert's classical education at the prestigious Jesuit-run Collège de Navarre made him an able Latinist and inspired his youthful fascination with the ancient world. However, it was his journey to Rome in 1754 in the entourage of the newly-appointed French Ambassador to the Holy See -- the Comte de Stainville, later Duc de Choiseul -- that introduced him first-hand to those decaying monuments of the past that would become his lifelong artistic preoccupation and win him the sobriquet Robert des Ruines. He remained in Rome for eleven years, and through his unofficial attachment to the French Academy met important collectors and artists, including Fragonard; the great Italian engraver, Piranesi; and the painter of ruins, Panini, who profoundly influenced his work. He was introduced to the Abbé de Saint-Non, an antiquarian who in 1760 commissioned him and Fragonard to make drawn copies of the Greek, Roman and Egyptian antiquities that Saint-Non later reproduced in his deluxe guidebooks of Italian cities and their works of art.
Although Robert, like virtually all Europeans, had never been to Egypt, Rome had important Egyptian monuments that had been brought to the city, as well as Egyptianizing structures erected during the late years of Roman Empire, all easily available for his study. Several of Robert's Roman views dating from the late 1750s are enlivened with Egyptian motifs -- the Sphinxes, fragments of pharaonic sculpture, obelisks and pyramids that were fast becoming the standard repertoire of European 'Egyptomania'. The present painting is a variant on Robert’s composition of 1798, Girls Dancing around an Obelisk, now in the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (fig. 1; inv. no. 1964.1464). In both works the artist juxtaposes the majesty of the ancient ruins with lively staffage. Dressed in the fashion of Robert’s day, the young dancers are caught in the music, oblivious to the passage of time. Beside them the broken obelisk and fountain basin tell a different story: great empires will fall, this earthly life is transient. It is this contrast that lends the philosophical depth to Robert’s work that Diderot described as the ‘poetic of ruins’.