A Palace with an Arched Bridge (A Roman Villa) (1760): Art, History and Details

A Palace with an Arched Bridge (A Roman Villa) (1760) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Hubert Robert (French, 1733–1808).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Hubert Robert had been living in Rome for five years when he executed this watercolor. He was fascinated by the architecture and gardens he saw in Italy and became especially interested in the picturesque interaction between Italy's rich artistic past and the daily life he saw on the streets. This sheet does not represent an actual view. It is, rather, an invention of the artist, who liked to create architectural fantasies by combining the different types of structures he became familiar with in Rome. Here, he enlivened the view with washerwomen doing laundry.

Object facts

• Title: A Palace with an Arched Bridge (A Roman Villa)
• Date: 1760
• Creator attribution: Hubert Robert (French, 1733–1808)
• Culture: France
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: pen and brown and gray ink, graphite, and watercolor
• Dimensions: Sheet: 30.9 x 27.8 cm (12 3/16 x 10 15/16 in.)
• Collection: DR - French
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2008.362

Collection credit

Bequest of Muriel Butkin

Further reading listed by the museum

• Foster, Carter E., Sylvain Bellenger, and Patrick Shaw Cable. French Master Drawings from the Collection of Muriel Butkin. [Cleveland, Ohio]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 2001.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.