Ruines romaines, le Forum avec le Colisée et l'Obélisque

This 1765 painting of Roman ruins including the Forum with the Colosseum and an obelisk, in Paris's Petit Palais, is a capriccio combining real Roman monuments in an imaginary arrangement. Robert spent eleven years in Rome (1754-1765), absorbing the classical ruins that would define his artistic identity. Hubert Robert, known as "Robert des Ruines" for his specialty in architectural capricci combining real and imagined antique ruins, was the most popular decorative landscape painter in pre-Revolutionary France. His years at the French Academy in Rome (1754-1765) gave him direct experience of the ancient ruins that would become his signature subject: the Colosseum, Hadrian's Villa, the temples of the Forum transformed into settings for staffage figures of washerwomen, tourists, and peasants whose human scale measured the grandeur and the desolation of the ancient world. His paintings served simultaneously as decoration for aristocratic interiors and as meditations on the transience of human achievement — a reflection on history's relationship to the present that would become urgently relevant during the revolutionary upheaval he witnessed in his lifetime.

The monumental ruins are arranged for maximum picturesque effect, the Colosseum and obelisk combined with lesser ruins in an idealized composition. Robert's warm, golden light gives the ancient stones a romantic glow.