A Stone Cottage

The multitalented Robert was a successful landscape painter, a skilled draftsman, a designer of gardens for Louis XVI, a commissioner-curator at the new national museum, the Louvre, and an accomplished etcher. He had traveled to Rome in 1754 with his protector the Count of Stainville who enrolled him at the French Academy. For eleven years, Robert, with his friend Fragonard, executed drawings and paintings of ancient and modern Rome and the countryside, although he was particularly attracted to ruins. Back in Paris, he was received into the Royal Academy as a “painter of ruins.” Robert also made lively chalk drawings in the environs of Paris like A Stone Cottage. He depicts a rustic home with the farmer’s wife handing a lunch basket to her husband. Robert was sensitive to his picturesque, natural surroundings. However, the red chalk passages which suggest the thatched roof and the masonry remain fundamentally stylized and decorative.