Entrance to the Grotto of Posillipo

Located on the route from Naples to Pozzuoli, the Grotto of Posillipo was a popular destination for travelers to Italy in the eighteenth century. Hubert Robert visited the site in 1760, on a trip he took with the abbé de Saint-Non (1727-1791). The studies he made there are today documented only by a watercolor held in a private collection (London, Christie’s, December 12, 1985, lot 324) and an etching by Clément-Pierre Marillier and Emmanuel J. N. de Ghendt for Saint-Non’s Voyage pittoresque ou description des royaumes de Naples et de Sicile (1781, tome I, p. 82, no 37).

The attribution of the Met’s sheet, however, raises some questions. The drawing was made by applying brown ink and wash over a red chalk counterproof (an impression made by pressing damp paper against a red chalk drawing, resulting in a paler image in reverse). The original red chalk drawing, from which the counterproof was taken, has not been located. Differences in size, technique and details of the composition argue against seeing the Met’s drawing as the model for the etching in Saint-Non’s book. Looking closely at the Met’s drawing, the wash brushstrokes bear little resemblance to the technique of Robert, who tended to describe foliage with thin lines of ink. Here, the accumulation of small dots as well as the free application of wash seems rather to imitate the manner of Jean-Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806).

Because the view depicted in the Met’s drawing corresponds to how the scene appears in reality, the lost original for the underlying counterproof must have been, in our opinion, a copy after a counterproof made after a lost original by Hubert Robert’s hand. This hypothesis is supported by the fact that several views drawn by Robert in the Italian countryside in 1760 are of a similar technique and dimensions. In a parallel example, several of Robert’s counterproofs of views of the Temple of Paestum, including one held in the Bibliothèque municipale of Besançon in France (see Sarah Catala, Les Hubert Robert de Besançon, 2013, no. 17), were copied by a French engineer, Pierre-Joseph Antoine (1730-1814).

One final element supporting the argument that this sheet derives from a copy based on a counterproof of a composition by Robert can be found in the cartouche on the blue mount. The design and handwriting of the cartouche correspond closely to those seen on mounts of the red chalk counterproofs after Robert drawings in Besançon (bibliothèque : acc. nos vol. 451, 25, 43 and 46 ; musée des beaux-arts : acc. no D. 2983). But in those cases, Hubert Robert’s name is always indicated in the inscription within the cartouche, as opposed to the inscription in the cartouche on the mount of the Met’s sheet, which only identifies the location of the view. The Besançon counterproofs come from the collection of Robert’s friend, the architect Pierre-Adrien Pâris (1745-1809), and the majority were mounted by his contemporary, François Renaud. While the authorship of the Met’s drawing is unknown and its eighteenth-century provenance undocumented, these observations offer enticing possibilities for future research.

Sarah Catala and Perrin Stein (December 2016)

Credit: Gift of Harold K. Hochschild, 1940