Probably The Marquise de Broc;
Probably the Comtesse de Lantivy;
Anonymous sale (Madame X), her sale, Paris, Galerie Georges Petit (Maitre Henri Baudoin), 6-7 December 1926, lot 120;
Probably With Georges Wildenstein & Co.;
Probably With Leonard Koetser, London;
With Colnaghi, London;
Purcha𓆉sed from the above by the present collectoꦇr in 2000.

Probably Los Angeles, County Museum of Art, Five Centuries of European Painting, 1933, no. 35.⁴

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has a recent lining with an older stretcher. The restoration is also recent. There are few accidental damages, with some comparatively small losses mainly in the upper right sky, but the paint may have become brittle at some time and lost minute particles across the surface. The luminous flowing brushwork of the clouds and landscape in the centre appears to have been stronger and richer in medium and is well preserved, with the upper sky and the outer band of sky down the left edge being quite thin. In the more worn areas there are many little strengthening retouchings, including in the cows and in many of the darker places, interspersed with some good detail. The signature is rather fragmented. This report was not done under laboratory conditions."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The prominent temple on the right of the composition with its Corinthian columns is undoubtedly inspired by the famous Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli outside Rome. Robert visited Tivoli in the summer of 1760, which he spent with Fragonard and the Abbé de Saint-Non at the villa which the latter had rented. There he made numerous drawings of the site, a good example of which is today in Valence, Musée des Beaux-Arts.¹ Tivoli remained one of his favourite motifs and was incorporated into many of Robert's paintings after his return to Paris in 1765. The most spectacular of these is probably the enormous canvas of 1779 now in the Château de Maisons-Lafitte in France.² Many of Robert's reminiscences of Tivoli and other classical sites incorporated figures of artists sketching, although rarely in masquerade costume as here. This may reflect the contemporary taste for exotic 'Spanish' dress advocated by Robert's patron Madame Geoffrin. Similarly Robert's works in this vein often contain humorous or pointed references to the decay and abandoned fate of many classical ruins, and here the temple itself is clearly used as a byre, from which the cattle are shown leaving for pasture. This was not entirely fanciful, for as Robert's own drawings clearly show, the spaces below the Temple of the Sibyl itself were also used as a hay barn. Although a chronology for Robert's works is notoriously difficult to establish, a capriccio of 1779 of similar design and likewise including the Temple of the Sibyl is in the Louvre, and the present work may well be of a similar or slightly later date.³

 

1. Exhibited in Washington, National Gallery of Art, Hubert Robert. Paintings and watercolours, 1978, no. 18.
2. Exhibited in Rome, Villa Medici, J.H. Fragonard e H. Robert a Roma, 1990-91, no. 150.
3. See P. Rosenberg, Musée du Louvre - Catalogue illustré des Peintures, Ecole Française XVII et XVIII siècles, Paris 1974, vol. II, pp. 89 and 216, no. 737.
4. This and the de Broc, de Lantivy, Wildenstein and Koetser provenance are all recorded on a Witt Library Mount. At these date✅s the signature on the painting was not recorded.