Les Bains d'Apollon à Versailles

Les Bains d'Apollon à Versailles from around 1803, now in the Musée Carnavalet, depicts the artificial grotto that Robert himself designed as part of his work redesigning sections of the Versailles gardens. Robert had been appointed a garden designer for Versailles in 1778, and the Baths of Apollo — a rocky grotto housing Girardon's famous sculptural group of Apollo attended by nymphs after his daily course across the sky — was among his most celebrated contributions to the royal gardens. By 1803 Versailles had survived the Revolution in a transformed state: stripped of much of its furniture and ornament, opened to the public, and no longer the center of royal power, it had become a monument to a vanished world. Robert's late painting of his own creation thus carries a particular poignancy: the designer of the grotto returned to document his work in the context of the regime that had commissioned it having been swept away. His atmospheric treatment of the rocky grotto with its sculptural group, illuminated by filtered natural light, demonstrates his lifelong mastery of the interplay between nature and art that his garden work had made literal.

The grotto setting combines natural rock formations with Girardon's sculptural group of Apollo attended by nymphs. Robert's characteristic play of light and shadow within the rocky enclosure creates a theatrical atmosphere.