Château de Madame du Barry
The estate's most famous building is the Pavillon de Musique, a music and reception pavilion constructed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1770–71).
The château is an approximately cubic construction, of average size and modest appearance, which borders the chemin de la Machine, a favourite subject of the Impressionists Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.
The King gave the building, then called Pavillon des Eaux, to Baron Arnold de Ville, the engineer originally of Liège who had conceived the hydraulic installation.
In the 1980s, the château was acquired by a Japanese heiress, Nakahara Kiiko,[1] and her Marseillais-born French-American husband, illegally using the name of her family's company Nippon Sangyo, as a commercial asset.
In spite of the negative opinions given by several of her circle, notably Gabriel, Mme du Barry decided to retain Ledoux as the architect for the project.
In 1773, Mme du Barry, obviously satisfied with the pavilion, ordered from Ledoux the plans for a large château which was to incorporate the small building.
When it was acquired in 1923 by the perfumer François Coty from the politician and industrial Louis Loucheur, the house was found to be subject to a grave disorder because of the sinking slope on which it was built.
The move was accompanied by profound transformations: the mansard roof was converted into an attic sheltering five bedrooms, while vast dependences were created in the basement to arrange a perfume laboratory, an electric generator, kitchens and a swimming pool.
A project was initiated to pump cement into the tunnels but this was abandoned, and the American School moved to another site in Saint Cloud.
The entry, in the form of an open semi-circular apse, with a coffered half-dome ceiling simply closed by a screen of Ionic columns, has a disposition already used by Ledoux in the house of Marie-Madeleine Guimard on the roadway of Antin.
The side towards the Seine is known from a drawing made by the British neoclassicist Sir William Chambers:[4] in Chambers' drawing, unlike Ledoux's commemorative engraving (illustration, right), its three central bays project in the accustomed Gabriel manner, with attached Ionic columns and bas-relief panels above the severely plain window openings; in the flanking single bays the windows have plain entablatures surmounted by low plinths of concave profile.
In either version the elevation reflects "Ledoux's efforts to accentuate the cuboidal structure of a building and to handle the Classical motifs with such precision and economy that the large, reticent wall-surfaces against which they are seen are rendered doubly significant and effective".
There are some surviving chairs of the suite, which was already in production in 1769 and must at first have been intended for the château, though they were used in the pavilion and are seen in Moreau le Jeune's drawing (illustration, left).
The original state of the interiors is known by way of a drawing by Jean-Michel Moreau representing the dinner offered to Louis XV by Mme du Barry for the inauguration of the house, which can be compared with an engraving by Ledoux.
A later theory was that the paintings were in the Rococo style and du Barry's pavilion was decidedly Neo Classical, thus clashing terribly.
In 1772, to decorate the park, Louis XV gave Mme du Barry the Bather, which Christophe-Gabriel Allegrain had exhibited in the Salon of 1767 (illustration, right).
In 1776 Mme du Barry commissioned from Allegrain a pendant bather, completed in 1778; as Vénus and Diane they offered an allegory of sensuous and of chaste love.
