A Kitchen in a vaulted Hall

According to the inscription on the mount of this drawing, from the collector Louis Deglatiny, a Rouen merchant and archaeologist, this vaulted kitchen depicts la ‘salle des gardes’: so called Cuisines de Saint-Louis. The kitchens are in the medieval Palais de la Cité, situated on the Ile de la Cité in Paris, the residence of the French king until the 14^th Century and today called ‘salle des Pas perdus de la Conciergerie’. A counterproof of this drawing, from the collection of Pierre-Adrien Pâris (1745-1819), is now in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Besançon (inv. vol. 452, n° 57; Catala, op. cit.). Sarah Catala dates the present drawing to about 1760 or later, when the artist had come back from Italy (ibid.).

Even after his return to France, Hubert Roberts' imagination remained rooted in Italy, and he continued to produce drawings and paintings of Italian architectural capriccios. Parisian views are rare in his œuvre, and are more often rendered in paint: of the 149 works he exhibited at the Salon between 1767 and 1798, no more than ten depict Parisian subjects (C. Leribault in Hubert Robert 1733-1808. Un peintre visionnaire, exhib. cat., Paris, musée du Louvre, Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2016, p. 368). The present drawing is therefore even more significant in illustrating the iconographic breadth of Hubert Robert’s production.