Young woman with a pail, by a ruined architrave

During his stay in Italy, from 1754 to 1765, Hubert Robert created picturesque compositions that combined what he observed in the Roman countryside, in the famous collections of the Villa Medici, Palazzo Mancini and in the Capitoline Museum. In this drawing, the antique architectural fragment in the foreground becomes the main subject of the composition while the woman, in the background, adds liveliness to the scene.

There are other drawings, both in red and in black chalk, in which Hubert Robert inserts antique ruins in picturesque settings. Among these are two studies, one in black chalk and the other in red chalk, at the musée des beaux-arts in Besançon (inv. D.1521 and D. 1713; S. Catala, Les Hubert Robert de Besançon, exhib. cat., Besançon, Museum of Fine Arts and Archaeology, 2013, nos. 26 and 66).