Léopold Robert was influential in his day for bringing new motifs into painting that coincided with the richly imaginative tendencies of the Romantic decades. The exhibition explores how brigands and beautiful Italian women sprang into life in his preparatory drawings and lived on after the painting was complete. The earlier sketches and later engravings capture the various states of a subject or setting, shedding light on the process of creating and disseminating an image via a range of techniques that all played on the lightness of paper as a medium.

Léopold Robert was born in nearby Les Éplatures in 1794 and studied in Paris before building his career in Rome and later Venice, where he died in 1835. He attached great importance to managing how his images circulated. His many and varied uses of paper – sketches in letters to friends and family, copies held in catalogues to avoid the dispersal of his works, and prints heralding the success of a particular painting or familiarising audiences with his own face – were all carefully considered and reflect various states of a body of work undergoing constant reinvention. Léopold Robert was an extraordinarily popular artist who worked within the laws of the marketplace. The multiple drawings point to variations and repetitions of popular subjects, a strategy dictated by audience demands and his plans for his own artistic career.

The exhibition was made possible thanks to the support of the Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art.