French landscape garden

[4] After the military defeats of France at the beginning of the 18th century and the freezing winter of 1709, the royal treasury was unable to finance upkeep of the elaborate gardens of Versailles.

Later, the gardens of Capability Brown, who had studied with William Kent, had an important influence in France, particularly his work at Stowe (1748), Petworth (1752), Chatsworth (1761), Bowood (1763) and Blenheim Palace (1769).

[7] In 1743, Father Attiret, a French Jesuit priest and painter in service to the Emperor of China, wrote a series of letters describing the Chinese gardens he had seen.

Everything works on this principle: it is a pastoral and natural countryside that one wants to represent: a solitude and not a well-ordered palace following all the rules of symmetry and proportions.

In 1757 Sir William Chambers, an English writer and traveller who made three trips to China, published a book called Designs of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines, and Utensils, with a chapter about gardens.

Chambers brought to Europe the Chinese idea that gardens should be composed of a series of scenes which evoke different emotions, ranging from enchantment to horror to laughter.

The horrible scenes present hanging rocks, cataracts, caverns, dead tree broken by the storm, burnt or shattered by lightning, and buildings in ruins...

Landscape gardens in France began to include artificial hills, pagodas, and promenades designed to provoke emotions ranging from melancholy to sadness to joy.

The French historian Jurgis wrote: "the theme of this Paradise, once restored by setting free flowers, earth and water, was the guiding principle in the development of landscape gardens.

In opposing his Elysian Fields, the Orchard at Clarens to the serried trees sculpted into parasols, fans, marmosets, and dragons, Rousseau reawakens this myth with its new liberties.

He travelled to Paris, was introduced to Rousseau, and persuaded him to visit the garden and stay in a small cottage designed to resemble the house of Julie, called Elysee, described in La Nouvelle Heloise.

[Note 1] Girardin made the park at Ermenonville a living illustration of Rousseau's ideas; making carefully constructed landscapes, like paintings, designed to invite the visitor to take long walks and to feel pure and simple emotions.

[Note 2] The paths were designed to follow the hillsides, climbing up and down, to give a various view, from shadows of groves of trees to sunlight, and meandering to let the viewer delight the scene from different angles and light.

[16] In France they were influenced by the paintings and drawings of Hubert Robert, who depicted romantic scenes of crumbling antique ruins seen during his visits to Italy.

They were usually either recreations of the Garden of Eden or of the pastoral Arcadia of Roman myths, or they were designed to offer a visual tour of the history of mankind or of all the world.

The gardens of the Château de Bagatelle at Paris contained follies in the form of the temple of the God Pan, the house of the Chinese philosopher, a Pharaoh's tomb, and a hermit's cell.

On his death he was interred on an island in the river, the Île des Peupliers; the neo-classical tomb and its attendant grove of poplar trees were depicted in several prints of the period – it became a place of pilgrimage for his many admirers.

Because of its connection with Rousseau, the garden has attracted many famous visitors, including Joseph II of Austria, King Gustave III, the future Czar Paul I of Russia, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Danton, Robespierre, Chateaubriand, Queen Marie Antoinette and Napoleon Bonaparte.

[Note 3] It featured picturesque structures and mysterious ruins, and the walks and views took advantage of the park's site on a hillside overlooking the Garonne valley and, in the far distance, the chain of the Pyrenees, stretched out along the southern horizon.

In 1773, he was asked by the Duc de Chartres, the son of Louis-Philippe d'Orleans and the future Philippe Egalité, to design a garden around a small house that he was building to the northwest of Paris.

It included a series of fabriques, or architectural structures, while it illustrated all the styles known at the time: antiquity, exoticism, Chinese, Turkish, ruins, tombs, and rustic landscapes, all created to surprise and divert the visitor.

He called the garden le Désert de Retz,[Note 4] and planted it with four thousand trees from the royal greenhouses, and rerouted a river and created several ponds.

The garden, completed in 1785, contained twenty-one follies, or architectural constructions, representing different periods of history and parts of the world; they included an artificial rock, a temple of rest, a theatre, a Chinese house, a tomb, a ruined Gothic church, a ruined altar, an obelisk, a temple to the god Pan, a Siamese tent, and an ice-house in the form of a pyramid.

The first such ornamental farm in France was the Moulin Joly, but there were similar rustic buildings at Ermenonville, Parc Monceau, and the Domaine de Raincy.

At her death in 1764 the unfinished house passed into the sphere of his new mistress Madame du Barry, who did little with it being more interested in her new Pavilion at Château de Louveciennes.

In 1783 Marie Antionette ordered the creation of the Hameau de la Reine, the most famous of all the rustic villages created for gardens of the period.