View of the Gardens at the Villa Mattei
1761.
Red chalk. Inscription: recto lower left ‘Villa Mattei’; verso ‘IC 31’; No. 229.MS on mount.
350 x 526 mm.
(13 1/5 x 20 7/10 inches.)
Provenance: Georges Mülhbacher; Jean Hottinguer, Paris, 3rd March 1944, Lot 12; and thence by descent.
Paris 1733 ~ 1808 Paris
During their student days at the French Academy in Rome, Hubert Robert and Jean-Honoré Fragonard executed a large number of red chalk views of Rome and the surrounding countryside. Charles-Joseph Natoire, then director of the French Academy, organized sketching trips into the countryside because, as he wrote to his superiors, ‘Around Rome are the most beautiful sites for landscape that one can imagine . . . ’.There are no precedents for the largescale red chalk landscapes that Robert and Fragonard drew in Rome, and they remain unrivalled for their evocation of the textures of the masonry of a building or the play of light and shadow over luxuriant vegetation.
The casino and gardens of the Villa Mattei were situated on the Caelian Hill, one of the seven hills of ancient Rome.They were constructed in 1581 by the Mattei family but were already in a state of disrepair by the middle of the 18th century.1 Today the gardens have virtually been replaced by a modern park. Our drawing is one of three views by Robert known today of the casino and gardens. One of these is a red chalk study of a fountain enclosed by a niche, preserved in a counterproof inscribed in pen, ‘fontaine del casino/Mattei’.The original drawing cannot be identified.2 The counterproof is part of the magnificent gift of drawings made to the museum and library of Besançon by the friend and near contemporary of Robert, the architect and designer, Pierre-Adrien Paris.The second view is a lost drawing known from an etching by the Abbé Jean-Claude-Richard de Saint-Non, a wealthy amateur interested in printmaking who travelled to Rome in 1759. He made friends with Robert and Fragonard and executed numerous prints after their drawings. Among these was Robert’s Vue prise dans les jardins de Villa Mattei aux environs de Rome en 1761.3 The print is a view of the terraced outer wall surrounding part of the casino and garden, and in a general way is similar to the composition of the present drawing.There are variations in the details of the two compositions, such as the omission of the wall fountain shown in Saint-Non’s print and the break in the lower terrace which Robert introduced into our drawing. Because large, elaborately finished drawings such as our sheet were time-consuming to execute, they must have been finished in the studio from sketches made on site.It is not uncommon that Robert added or left out details to create a more harmonious composition.The date of 1761 on the print indicates that the three views were made about that time or shortly before.4
1. Saint-Non and Fragonard, Panopticon Italiano. Un diario di viaggio ritrovato, 1759–1761, ed.Pierre Rosenberg with Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Rome, 1986, p.156.
2. Georges K. Lukomski and Pierre de Nolhac, La Rome d’Hubert Robert, Paris, 1930, pl.65, p.31.
3. Saint-Non, Recueil de Griffonnes, Paris, c. 1780, pl.37.
4. I am extremely grateful to Victor Carlson for writing this entry on my behalf.
