1800
oil
canvas
From the collection of Montreal Museum of Fine Arts
Dominant colour
Girls Dancing Around An Obelisk is a 1800 oil by Hubert Robert, a Neoclassicism work, held at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.
This painting shows a group of girls dancing around a tall, ancient-looking obelisk. The obelisk is surrounded by other ruins, including a large stone head and a sphinx. The girls are dressed in white and are holding hands as they dance. In the background, there are pyramids and other ancient structures, giving the scene a sense of history and culture. The painting is done in a classical style, with attention to detail and realism. The artist's use of light and shadow adds depth and dimension to the scene, drawing the viewer's eye to the dancing girls. If you're interested in learning more about this style of painting, you might want to look up the technique of chiaroscuro.
Girls Dancing Around an Obelisk is an oil-on-canvas painting by French painter Hubert Robert, made in 1798. The work has been held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since 1964.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Robert often depicted scenes with ancient Egyptian and classical architecture, which was a common thematic subject of Romanticism. Despite the painting's setting, Robert had never visited Egypt, and likely based the work on studies of ancient Egyptian monuments in Rome. The main subject of the painting are nine female figures who are performing the farandole dance around the base of an obelisk. The scene also includes figures perched on the obelisk's plinth, playing musical instruments. The figures in the painting are dressed in the 18th-century fashion of the artist's time. The obelisk and…
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Some have interpreted the nine dancing figures in the work as a reference to the Masonic Lodge of the Nine Sisters, a prominent French fraternity whose members included Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. The Lodge, whose name was based on the nine Muses of antiquity, was purported to have been frequented by Robert. The work is also thought to have been inspired by the events leading up to the French campaign in Egypt and Syria, which was undertaken by Napoleon in 1798.
Read the full account in the museum source.
Source: wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Hubert Robert (French pronunciation: ; 22 May 1733 – 15 April 1808) was a French painter in the school of Romanticism, noted especially for his landscape paintings and capricci, or semi-fictitious picturesque depictions of ruins in Italy and of France.
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