A Hall in the Museum of Monuments

Hubert Robert, known to us today above all as a painter of landscape ruins, also recorded in his works the nascent museum world in Paris after the French Revolution. As the last curator of the royal painting collection, he was interested in developments at the Louvre as well as in the former Convent of the Petits Augustins, where the painter Alexandre Lenoir had been collecting architectural fragments, tombstones, and sculptures that had survived the vandalism of the revolution. Two years after the Louvre opened its doors, the Musée des monuments français received its first visitors, in 1795. In the painting A Hall in the Museum of Monuments, two women having a conversation in the foreground, an interested traveler on an educational journey, and a draftsman sitting in the background, in addition to other figures, guide us through the entry hall of the museum, which is dominated by the tomb of Diane de Poitiers. With the restitution of the Bourbons in 1816, the Musée des monuments français was closed. The works that Lenoir had amassed either went to the Louvre or were returned to their places of origin. Robert’s The Garden of Monuments, a painting dating from ca. 1802, is also in the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen.