L'Entrée d'une grotte

This tall canvas was made in 1784 for a bathing room. Hubert Robert painted a set of six for the salle des bains of the comte d'Artois, the youngest brother of Louis XVI, at his little pleasure house of Bagatelle just outside Paris, which had been thrown up a few years earlier on a wager. Robert had spent years in Italy and filled his work with ruins and grottoes. The dark cave here most likely recalls a real one on the Bay of Naples. Five years after he finished the set, the Revolution swept away the world it was made to decorate, and Artois fled the country. The painting itself was later damaged by water and restored, a fitting hazard for a picture that once hung in a bath.