The Old Temple
Hubert Robert
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The Story
The painting of Classical ruins had reached the zenith of its popularity when Hubert Robert, the leading French practitioner of this specialty, was commissioned in 1787 to paint a suite of four canvases for a wealthy financier’s château at Méréville, near Paris. The Fountains and its companion pieces were set into the paneled walls of a salon in the château, creating an alternate space that played off of the elegant, Neoclassical decor of the room. Robert has studied in Rome from 1754 to 1765 and there had gleaned his artistic vocabulary.
Like the other three large paintings from the group painted for Méréville, all in the Art Institute, The Fountains exploits Robert’s typical vocabulary of fictive niches, arches, coffered vaults, colonnades, majestic stairwells, and Roman statuary to create a fantasy of expansive space. The four paintings are inhabited by tiny figures in the foreground; these serve only to set the scale and animate the scene, for the ruins themselves are the true subject of the pictures.
As Oil on canvas (255.3 × 221.2 cm (100 1/2 × 88 1/8 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. The apparent casualness is staged — objects and gestures are arranged to read as a moment caught rather than composed.
Today the painting is held by Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, where it remains a touchstone for understanding Hubert Robert's contribution to Western art. It has been studied, copied, restored, and argued over for centuries — proof that great paintings keep generating new readings long after their creators have gone.
“A silence so complete it becomes its own witness.”
