Portrait of Hubert Robert

early 1900s

Portrait of Hubert Robert, early 1900s. Copy after Augustin Pajou (French, 1730–1809). Terracotta; overall: 71 x 49 x 27.3 cm (27 15/16 x 19 5/16 x 10 3/4 in.); without base: 54.6 cm (21 1/2 in.). The Cleveland Museum of Art, Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund 1987.8 James David Draper published this work in 1997 as a 19th-century copy after Pajou, one of a number of copies after the primary version in Valence, partly owing to the slightly stiffer carving of the Cleveland bust and the lack of psychological depth compared to the autograph version. A thermoluminescence test, which determines the age of fired ceramics through small samples of the clay, proved that the work could not date before the late nineteenth century, and could easily date to the twentieth century. Many of the copies after Pajou may well postdate Henri Stein's 1912 monograph, when the originals became available in photographic form, and the Cleveland bust is one of the stronger and most convincing examples.