The Old Temple
Hubert Robert • 1787 • Art Institute of Chicago
The four large canvases by Hubert Robert in the Art Institute's collection were commissioned by wealthy financier Jean-Joseph, Marquis de Laborde, to decorate a salon in his château at Méréville, France. Installed on all sides of the room, they would have suggested that the walls had dissolved, revealing fantasies of Classical architecture animated by scenes of everyday life. Robert was much sought after as a painter of architectural ruins, a genre that appealed to the late 18th-century taste for the antique.
He cultivated his knowledge of antiquity over more than a decade of travel and study in Italy.
As Oil on canvas (255 × 223.2 cm (100 3/8 × 87 7/8 in.); Framed: 265.5 × 233.4 cm (104 1/2 × 91 7/8 in.)), the work shows the tool marks and layering choices typical of Hubert Robert's output in this period — decisions about ground, underpainting, and glaze that a photograph can only partly convey.
Look closely and the painting opens up. Objects you might pass over — a folded letter, a half-drawn curtain, the angle of a glance — were placed to be read. Scenes like this were prized precisely because they made ordinary labor and leisure worth painting at all.
Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago now holds the work, where conservators and historians continue to revisit its condition and attribution. Each generation of scholarship adds a layer to how Hubert Robert's output from this period is understood.
