Keeper of the King’s Pictures

Keeper of the King’s Pictures

Each time I pass through the Grande Galerie—pass through is the fitting phrase, since the Galerie is so vast that one can never do more than get a glimpse of it, in hopes of returning—I think of Hubert Robert’s extraordinary painting The Grande Galerie in Ruins (1796), a meditation upon time, the Revolution, and the end of the Old Régime, by the former Keeper of the King’s Pictures. But, today, another one of his works has caught my attention: View from a Cell at the Prison of Châtelet (Sully, room 930). As I stood before this painting, I was mistaken at first. I thought Hubert Robert himself was the prisoner. He was indeed imprisoned at Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare during the Terror. I saw his prison works during the magnificent 2016 Louvre exhibition Hubert Robert (1733–1808): A Visionary Painter, and I admired how, threatened with the guillotine, he devoted his final thoughts to painting his cell. But this painting here is dated 1789. Hubert Robert is said to have visited the Baron de Besenval in prison. The baron, military governor of Paris, had allowed the storming of the Bastille by withdrawing his troops and had been arrested as a traitor to his country. Hubert Robert, for his part, took up his lodgings at the Louvre again once he was freed, and became the curator of the museum, the future Musée du Louvre. He lived in a corner of the palace, and died here.