A mother and child drawing wine from a barrel in a ruined wine cellar

A painter, draftsman, etcher and landscape designer, Hubert Robert was one of the most successful and prolific landscape painters in eighteenth-century France. He specialized in architectural scenes in which topographical elements derived from the monuments of ancient and modern Italy and France were combined in often fantastic settings.

In 1754, Robert moved to Rome in the entourage of the Comte de Stainville, who had been appointed French Ambassador to the Holy See, where he was to remain for the next eleven years. By 1759, he had been made pensionnaire of the Académie de France in Rome, then under the directorship of Charles-Joseph Natoire. In this he was supported by Madame de Pompadour's brother, the marquis de Marigny, directeur des bâtiments du Roi and future foreign minister. This level of support ensured his success in the Eternal City, which at that time was also home to Robert's friend, Fragonard, as well as the architectural painters Giovanni Paolo Panini and Piranesi. Under the influence of these latter two artists, Robert developed his own interpretation of the Roman architectural capriccio. For his mastery of the genre, Denis Diderot famously dubbed him 'Robert des ruines'.

When the present painting was offered at Christie's, New York, in 1992, Joseph Baillio identified it as an early work of the 1760s, painted during the artist’s formative years in Rome. Indeed, the shadowy, curved vault, brilliantly illuminated from below in the present painting, is entirely characteristic of the ruins Robert favored depicting in this period. The artist here delighted in painting the minute details of this ancient temple converted into a wine cellar. For example, he beautifully articulated the coffers and the crumbling statues that occupy the three niches along the curved wall. The small figures of the mother and child, who draw wine from a large wooden barrel, are seemingly oblivious to the beauty of the decaying architecture above them. Indeed, the building’s original function as a temple has grown obsolete. This picturesque juxtaposition is paralleled by the sympathetic dog in the foreground, who has claimed an overturned barrel as his home.

Robert returned to Paris in 1765, taking with him drawings of Italian buildings and landscapes that would be a source for his paintings for many years to come. Between 1767 and 1802, he exhibited regularly at the Salon, and was given lodgings in the Louvre in 1778, where he remained until 1802. In this period he painted some of his finest Italian landscapes, including the Portico of Octavius, Rome and the Portico of Marcus Aurelius, Rome, both of 1787 (Louvre, Paris). He also presented in a series of sketches his plans for replacing the Grande Galerie of the Louvre for the purposes of the museum. After the Revolution, between 1793 and 1794, he was imprisoned, where he managed to paint a few works, including some on china plates. In her Souvenirs (Paris, 1835-7), his friend, the portraitist Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Lebrun, recorded that this productive artist died 'brush in hand' as he prepared to go out for dinner.