The work of the eighteenth-century French painter Robert Hubert has not been fully appreciated until now, although during his lifetime this artist was a recognized genius and, one might even say, turned out to be a darling of fate. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, was close to the court, knew the great people of his time, for example, even decorated the castle in Ferney for Voltaire, got around to the fact that Jacques Delisle portrayed him in his famous poem "Imagination" …
However, Robert Hubert's greatest luck (or revelation) was, of course, his amazing paintings, which enjoyed unprecedented success in France and abroad. They were also bought with pleasure by Russian experts in painting, say, nobles Shuvalov, Stroganov, Yusupov - to decorate their palaces, Catherine II herself acquires several canvases for Tsarskoye Selo, and Emperor Paul orders four decorative panels from a fashionable French painter at once, which later decorated Gatchina Palace.
Today, Robert Hubert's paintings can be seen in almost all major museums in Europe, Russia, USA, Canada, Austria. His fabulous canvases adorn the Louvre, the Hermitage, famous palaces and estates of Russia. But the point is not even the popularity of the paintings of this mystical artist, but the fact that in them (and Hubert wrote more than five hundred canvases) he depicted, multifaceted and subtly truthful, some unknown fantastic world, which is an encyclopedic philosopher and the best art critic of that time Denis Diderot called the world of majestic ruins.
Idyll on the rubble of the majestic ruins
I would like to note that at the end of the last century, the Hermitage Bridge film studio planned to shoot a series of documentaries dedicated to the best masters of European painting. Unfortunately, only one film was born, but what's interesting is that its director Alexander Sokurov chooses for his documentary project for some reason not the most outstanding world painter, but the mystical French artist Robert Hubert (see the film "Robert. Happy Life" below). Is this accidental?..
Promotional video:
Robert Hubert was never a mystic. Critics called the artist's canvases during his lifetime and still call them nothing more than pictures of an imaginary world he invented. However, according to esotericists, a person cannot imagine and come up with anything that would not already exist somewhere or once. It turns out that the French painter managed to look into some kind of parallel world, where these majestic ruins really exist, like traces left from some culture, unprecedented in its grandeur, on the ruins of which an amazing idyll of a bright and such attractive life unfolds.
You can admire the paintings of Robert Hubert for an infinitely long time, they awaken the light Pushkin's sadness, remove anxiety and excitement from the soul, heal the heart from pride and bitterness of loss. But the most important thing is that they awaken in us the memory of something with light and beauty, which we once experienced and lost, but we constantly strive to return to this sweet fairy tale. How Robert Hubert succeeded is not clear, but one can only guess where he got all these majestic images of the divine happiness we have lost …