Portrait of Hubert Robert (early 1900s): Art, History and Details

Portrait of Hubert Robert (early 1900s) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Augustin Pajou (French, 1730–1809).

The work and its context

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

James David Draper published this work in 1997 as a 19th-century copy after Pajou, one of a number of copies after the primary version in Valence, partly owing to the slightly stiffer carving of the Cleveland bust and the lack of psychological depth compared to the autograph version. A thermoluminescence test, which determines the age of fired ceramics through small samples of the clay, proved that the work could not be dated before the late 19th century, and could easily date to the 20th century. Many of the copies after Pajou may well postdate Henri Stein's 1912 monograph, when the originals became available in photographic form, and the Cleveland bust is one of the stronger and most convincing examples.

Object facts

• Title: Portrait of Hubert Robert
• Date: early 1900s
• Creator attribution: Augustin Pajou (French, 1730–1809)
• Culture: France, early 20th century
• Type: Sculpture
• Technique: terracotta
• Dimensions: Overall: 71 x 49 x 27.3 cm (27 15/16 x 19 5/16 x 10 3/4 in.); without base: 54.6 cm (21 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Sculpture
• Department: European Painting and Sculpture
• Accession number: 1987.8

Collection credit

Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Turner, Evan H. “The Year in Review for 1987.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 75, no. 2 (February 1988): 30–71.

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.