This September marks the occasion to present our new catalogue devoted to Souvenirs of Italy and the Art of Portraiture.
Indeed, the Grand Tour became an essential rite of passage for artists from the end of the 16th century onwards. This desire for travel offered them the opportunity to discover new landscapes and capture the warm and distinctive light of the Eternal City and of Italy as a whole.
Immersing himself in the ancient sites, Hubert Robert devoted himself to the art of the capriccio, representing in his paintings imaginative arrangements of the great monuments of ancient Rome.
Deeply influenced by Giovanni Paolo Panini – whose view of the Colosseum, as well as his view of the Temple of Hadrian and Minerva Medica, are presented in this exhibition – and by the latter’s almost mathematical precision, Robert opposed this rigour with a highly theatrical sense of fantasy and virtuosity.
In these two exceptional paintings, which have remained in a private collection since the early 1990s, the artist dazzles us with the freedom of execution displayed in his depictions of the Pantheon and Trajan’s Column, as well as in this view of an ancient bridge.
His almost archaeological vision, strongly inspired by the excavations at Herculaneum and Pompeii from 1738 and 1748 onwards, transports us into an imagined world populated by figures from everyday eighteenth-century life, where washerwomen and peasants mingle with the remains of ancient Rome, fascinated by the legacy of its glorious past.
The journey continues with a highly subtle gouache landscape by Jean-Pierre Louis Laurent Hoüel. The artist travelled throughout Italy, visiting its most spectacular sites as far as Sicily, before publishing, between 1782 and 1797, his celebrated work entitled Voyage pittoresque des Isles de Sicile, de Malte et de Lipari.
To complete this exhibition, a section devoted to the art of portraiture from the 17th to the 19th century presents the rediscovery of a young violinist painted by the female artist Catherine Lusurier, who died prematurely at the age of twenty-eight. This signed and dated work of 1778 represents an important addition to the very limited body of works currently known by this artist.
The Baron Gérard will also be honoured with a remarkable half-length portrait of the Duchess of Rohan wearing a turban, which perfectly conveys the delicacy and refinement of fashion at the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Restoration.
I warmly invite you to visit the gallery from 17 September onwards to discover this remarkable selection.
Alexis Bordes
Paris, September 2026