One of the pleasures of visiting the Old Masters galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the chance to see, within a context of general continuity, the slight shifts in the “permanent” collection. Very often, as a well-known painting is shipped off to some exhibit, is being restored, or is visited by some comparable vicissitude, another work that has not seen daylight in generations is pulled out of storage to fill its place.

And so it is that now, and for the next few months, New Yorkers are treated to an entirely unannounced mini-retrospective of Hubert Robert, specifically eight landscapes that he painted in the 1770s and 1780s. More importantly, six of these constitute the complete series created for the Chateau de Bagatelle of the Comte d’Artois in 1777 and 1778. These entered the Met’s collection through the estate of J. P. Morgan in 1917.

Because of their illustrious provenance, the six paintings are an integral part of one of the most dazzling and spectacular cultural stunts of the ancien régime. The Bagatelle, built on a parcel of land between Neuilly and the Bois de Boulogne at the outskirts of Paris, was the result of a bet between the count, who was the youngest brother of Louis XIV, and his sister-in-law, Marie Antoinette. Both of them were passionate gamblers and he bet her that, during the court’s annual six-week sojourn at Fontainebleau, he could cause an entirely new chateau to be designed, constructed, and decorated. He apparently won his bet, and (according to Joseph Baillio in a fine article from volume 27 of the Metropolitan Museum Journal) the work was completed in all of 65 days.

How this was accomplished could serve as a lesson to many a municipality, not least our own, where the simple restoration of the Minton tiles in Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace — to take but one example — lasted, depending upon the way you count, more than three or more than 23 years. A master plan for the Bagatelle was drafted in two days and approved on September 1. On September 21, construction began and it was completed on November 26. During that time, the count engaged the services of 800 men to labor day and night to see the project to completion. Among these were the most gifted gilders, harpsichord manufacturers, clock-makers, lamp designers, carpet weavers, cabinetmakers and stuccadors of France.

Included in their number was Hubert Robert (1733–1805), one of the most popular French scene painters in France in the later 18th century. Robert had spent a good deal of time in Rome and the Campagna. His stock in trade was to capture, in a winsome and unchallenging way, the delicate poetry of decay: the shattered ruins of an aqueduct, an isolated column, a dilapidated fountain, and the like.

In conceiving the decorative program for the boudoir of the Palladian villa that was eventually built, Robert chose a variety of locales that are largely imaginary, though they have a foundation in real sites. One of the widest of the six paintings, which are all roughly 174 centimeters in height, is “The Wandering Minstrels,” a depiction of several figures in an architectural setting that is clearly based on the Capitol in Rome, with an obelisk adorning a fountain to the left. Perhaps the most delightful of the canvases, however, is “The Bathing Pool,” in which several female nudes, lifted bodily from the work of Boucher, are seen disporting before a shattered peristyle temple that recalls Tivoli. In an arty aside, Robert adorns the right and left sides of the composition with quotations from two statues by Pigalle, of Mercury and Venus.

Another work, “The Swing,” represents the same amorous scene that Fragonard was to make immortal. In the three remaining paintings, Robert shifts to the mouth of a cave, recalling some of the Neapolitan scenes of Claude Vernet; to a rugged mountain pass that suggests the landscapes of Gaspard Dughet, with couples dancing an allemande, and finally to a fountain beside an aqueduct, where several laundresses stand gossiping.

One of Robert’s closest friends, the great portraitist Elizabeth Vigee-Lebrun, wrote of him that “he painted a picture as quickly as he wrote a letter.” This facility is fully in evidence in the six paintings that make up the Bagatelle cycle. You should not seek in his work — with few exceptions—the control and precision of Panini, the Roman scene painter who was his main inspiration, nor will you find here the compositional sophistication or the painterly passion of Fragonard, his friend and rival. What you will find, however, amid the shaky two-point perspective that often marks his paintings, is a delightfully effortless spontaneity. The paint flows out of the artist like an exhalation. The very breath, the very breeze of the ancien regime, seems to remain in these works, that evanescent “douceur de vivre” that survives here like a bubble of ancient air trapped in amber.

The Chateau de Bagatelle as well survives, but in very different circumstances from those of its creation. Its dramatic construction became famous as “la folie d’Artois,” and, in the looming revolution, it would be turned into a potent symbol of the sybaritic excess of the old order. One of the most reactionary members of the court, the Comte d’Artois was also one of the first to leave France, two days after the storming of the Bastille, with a bounty on his head.

In the fullness of time, the building itself was transformed into a restaurant and then a hunting lodge for Napoleon, and much of its collection was dispersed. Such were the tumultuous circumstances in which, almost exactly 100 years later, the six works in question landed on our shores, where, for the next few months, they can be seen once again in the galleries of the Met.