Because of the interpretation of the inscription on this drawing it was kept under the name of Jacques-Louis David for some years. However, Pierre Rosenberg suggested the name of Hubert Robert (1733–1808), effectively dismissing the David attribution.(1) While Rosenberg suggested Robert’s name only tentatively, subsequent scholars—including Victor Carlson and Jean-Pierre Méjanès—have independently confirmed the Robert attribution.(2) According to Carlson, Robert's assured manner of drawing here indicates that the Crocker sheet is a mature work, most likely executed late in his career.

While Robert routinely drew in red chalk, the subject matter of this drawing is atypical for him. It is a copy from a painting and the artist is not known for making copies of paintings. Here he copied two figures from Guido Reni’s Massacre of the Innocents, painted in 1611 for the family of the conte Berò for their chapel in the church of San Domenico, Bologna. While Robert was in Rome for eleven years, it is not known that during his stay he ever traveled to Bologna. He traveled to Naples with the abbé de Saint-Non in 1760 and visited Florence in 1763. His Italian sojourn overlapped for a number of years with that of Fragonard but, unlike that artist, Robert never went back to Italy a second time.

Although not officially a pensionnaire, Robert was allowed to stay at the French Academy, thanks to the intervention of his patron the Duc de Choiseul.(3) It was stipulated, however, that he must participate in the academy’s regular program of instruction.(4) Like the other young artists, he responded to the experience of Rome in his many sketches and drawings of the monuments and people in and around the city. As a matter of course, he made drawings of antique statues—more often than not, however, as notations of objects seen in a particular place that he visited. His genius was as a painter of architecture and landscapes; he was particularly attracted to the city of Rome and its environs and ruins, and these became his preferred subject matter when he returned to Paris. He was known by his contemporary as Robert des Ruines.

During the 1790s Robert was a member of the committee to organize and direct the museum of the Louvre. While he may already have known Reni's Massacre of the Innocents from the many engravings made after it, it seems certain that he saw the painting in 1796 when the French took it from Bologna and brought it to Paris.(5) In his official capacity at the Louvre, he could hardly have missed seeing it at first hand. The inscription on the drawing can in fact clearly be read as the date 1796, written as Revolutionary year IV. Robert only depicted the poses of two of the women in the painting—the fleeing woman who looks over her shoulder with an expression of fright and another woman who is seen crouching in the left foreground, trying to protect her child. The artist probably chose these figures in particular for their poses, possibly to use in one of his own compositions.

Cara Denison, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010