"Robert of the Ruins"
Throughout his career Robert also produced works that focused on the countryside, people, and everyday life. However, his best and most well known works were those of ruins and fictive landscapes. It was the philosopher Denis Diderot (1713-1784) who coined the phrase “Robert des Ruines,” or “Robert of the Ruins,” in his writings on the Salon of 1767, highlighting the artist’s specialty. Diderot, deeply impressed by some of Robert’s exhibited works, excitedly wrote: “What beautiful, sublime ruins! What decisiveness and at the same time what lightness, control, and facility with the brush! What an effect! What grandeur! What nobility!”1 Evidently, Robert’s mastery of portraying both imaginative and real ruins caused many, including Diderot, to ruminate on the significance of time. His critique of Robert’s works from the Salon of 1767 descends into contemplative, even somber, poetics at certain moments: “The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures.”2
Please refer to the links below for formal analysis on some of Robert's works depicting ruins:
The Interior of the Temple of Diana at Nimes (1783)
View of the Grande Galerie in Ruins (1796)
Young Girls Dancing Around an Obelisk (1798)
SYL
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1Denis Diderot and John Goodman, Diderot on Art (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1995), 197.
2Ibid., 198.