Young Girls Dancing Around an Obelisk (1798)

Hubert Robert, Young Girls Dancing around an Obelisk, 1798, oil on canvas (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Canada)

Young Girls Dancing around an Obelisk (1798), another one of Robert’s oil on canvases, measures 120 x 99 centimeters, and exhibits a duality of meanings. In the painting, a group of young women dance around the base of an obelisk. Three musicians stand above them on the pedestal of the monument, playing their instruments. In the immediate foreground, several children watch and beckon towards the dancing girls as well. The crumbling obelisk stands slightly off-center, to the left. It ends abruptly in the top half of the canvas, and the pieces that have broken off rest on top of one another in the right foreground. The upper portion of the standing obelisk and the broken pieces on the ground are darkened by either dirt or vegetation, a sign that they have been decaying for some time. Behind the dancers and the ruined obelisk is a distinctly Egyptian landscape with a sphinx and several pyramids looming in the distance.

The frivolity and carefreeness of the painting is evident in the easygoing dance that the girls engage in. However, the nature of the composition is quite unusual in that Robert inserts what looks like a celebratory occasion into a scene that is otherwise rather humorless and solemn. There also isn’t an obvious indication as to why the girls are dancing in an Egyptian landscape wearing what are clearly Western-style dresses. There was a long history of Eyptomania in eighteenth-century Europe, so it is possible that Robert, or whoever commissioned this work, decided to add Egyptian motifs to exoticize the composition for a specific audience.

However, this still does not explain why the girls are parading around a damaged obelisk. Their youth, if anything, might serve to juxtapose the aging and dying nature of the monument. Overall though, it is difficult to discern what type of mood Robert was trying to convey in this composition. On one hand, the silliness of young girls dancing around a ruined monument might come across as humorous, but on the other hand, their unawareness of the obelisk’s terrible state of disrepair can be seen as tragic as well. 

For more information on the Egyptian obelisks Robert would have seen during his time in Rome, click here.