FrenchKate

April 6: More daydreams of France

One aspect of the Internet that I value is our ability to access hundreds of paintings by different artists. Take John Singer Sargent, for example, that remarkable 19th century artist (1856 - 1924). He is most famous for his portraits of 19th century aristocrats, but the ~800 works by Sargent accessible on Wikiart are remarkable for their range of subjects--portraits, yes, but also landscapes, interiors, gardens, flowers, religious subjects--and locations--in France, England, Italy, Egypt, Palestine, New England and Canada. 

In any case, here is Sargent's view of the Luxembourg gardens in Paris on a summer evening in 1879. 

I found a staircase that resembles the one painted by Sargent in the modern Luxembourg garden, thanks to google maps. I doubt this is the same one--that missing vase!--but it suggests that today's Luxembourg Garden retains much of its 19th century charm.

November 3: Have arrived safely in France for a two-week visit

I am so tired tonight; I ache all over; "Knackered," as my sister would say. We walked about seven miles today, and that is a lot for me. Plus, jet lag.

Our first day in France, 2019. My husband and I flew overnight from Minneapolis to Charles de Gaulle airport, picked up a car (an Alfa Romeo SUV!!) and drove to Chantilly, about 30 minutes north of Paris. Once there, we headed off to Chantilly's #1 attraction, the château de Chantilly, for lunch, art appreciation and exploration of its gardens.  It rained on and off, all day, but we spent most of it outside. Our hotel room would not be ready for us until after 3 PM so we had to keep moving.

I had hoped to have lunch at Le Captainerie, but was unable to get a reservation, so instead we wandered out to the restaurant in Chantilly's charming hameau--a rustic village in miniature--and had a very pleasant meal of duck confit and creme de chantilly on an apple tart.

We admired the fantastic art collection, full of treasures. I spent the most time in one gallery lined with grisaille windows telling the story of Cupid and Psyche. These were done for Écouen in 1544, and transferred to Chantilly. The library had an extraordinary display of illuminated manuscripts.

Finally, we walked back to our hotel, checked in and crashed. An excellent first day, in any case.

My phone was low on power so I took only a few photos.

Image 1: The view from my plane window at dawn. France was covered in clouds.

Image 2: The Great Stables in front of a huge cumulonimbus storm cloud. Built between 1719-1740 for the 7th Prince de Condé, the stables--a palace for horses--astonish me. Imagine spending so much on stables for horses!! According to legend, the Prince believed he would be reincarnated as a horse and wanted stables befitting his rank; hardly an explanation. In his day, the stables housed 240 horses and 500 dogs grouped into the different packs needed for the daily hunts. Today it is a museum of Horses with daily horse shows. 

Image 3: The chateau seen across its lake. The lower building is the petite château, the only part of the château spared by the Revolution. Most of what we tour today was built in the 19th century.

Image 4, 5 & 6: The mill at the hameau, the interior of the restaurant, the hameau in its setting. The hameau, hamlet, originally consisted of seven rustic thatched cottages with luxurious interiors, and was evidently the inspiration for Marie Antoinette's better known hameau at Versailles. Set in a garden, each cottage served to entertain--a kitchen, a dining room, a parlour, a billiards room, a reading room. The luxurious interiors and two of the cottages did not survive the Revolution, but the rest were restored by the Duke Aumale when he returned to Chantilly in 1870. He celebrated holidays here.  

Image 7: The lake. Everything is quite golden right now, in full fall colors. My camera has not done the colors justice.

Image 8: The art gallery. When the Duke Aumale died in 1879, his estate was left to the Institute de France on condition that the art galleries be left as he had arranged them. So this gallery takes us back to 19th century practice.

Image 9: the Cupid and Psyche gallery. These windows are worth taking time to appreciate so subtle and yet so complex.

Image 10: costumes for little visitors to better appreciate the site.

 

Nov 13: The gardens at Saint-Fargeau

The first winter that she lived at Saint-Fargeau, la Grande Mademoiselle created a jardin à la Français. She had brush and undergrowth removed and brought in earth to create a "fine avenue," though it was not long enough to make a "mall." She then extended the avenue with a terrace "one hundred paces" long; from this terrace, "one can see the château, a suburb, woods, vineyards, and a meadow with a river running through it, which in summer turns into a pool."  She installed parterre and flower beds near the house, and build a shuttlecock lawn. 

This French garden--jardin à la français--was replaced with an English landscape garden in 1807; the jardin à l'anglais was all the rage among the haut monde in the 18th and 19th centuries.  Many--perhaps most--great gardens were transformed; however, you can still spot the bones of an earlier French garden beneath many landscape gardens. (The English gardens must have been less expensive to maintain though that isn't discussed as a factor in the fashion.)

The features of the formal French garden were formalized in 1638 in Jacques de Boyceau de La Barauderie's Traite du jardinage selon les raisons de la nature et d'art.  La Grande Mademoiselle seems to have included most of the elements outlined by de Boyceau: 

--a geometric plan that emphasized straight lines, geometric shapes and symmetry. 

--Near the house, a parterre--a planting bed--that was visible from the château's principal rooms. Various geometric shapes--ovals, squares, circles, scrolls--would be laid out in an artful, symmetric pattern, framed by low box hedges and filled with mass plantings.  

--A central axis, consisting of lawn or pool bordered by trees and alleys, would extend perpendicular to the facade of the château on the side opposite the front entrance. Carefully trimmed trees and hedges and alleys would line this axis.

--Small groves of trees--sometimes centered around a fountain--served as a buffer between the formal garden and the forests in the park.

--a terrace allowed the visitor to admire the entire garden all at once from the château (itself a central element of the design)

When transforming the -jardin à la français to the jardin à l'anglais--not just at Saint-Fargeau, but in other château as well--geometric plans were softened, rectangular pools flooded their banks to create "natural" lakes (with the addition of a scenic small island, perhaps,) and grass replaced parterre and formal plantings. Groves of trees were expanded and curving paths installed.

This appears to be roughly what was done at Saint-Fargeau. More than 200 years have erased the traces of the earlier garden, but the shape of the lake in the aerial view suggests to me that this was the pool formed by the river in summer, made permanent--with alleys on both sides. The straight white lines on either side of the lake outline its ghost.

My husband and I walked around the lake while waiting for the spectacle to begin. According to Jacques Boyceau de La Barauderie "the principal reason for the existence of a garden is the esthetic pleasure which it gives to the spectator." À la Français or à l'Anglais, it was a lovely walk at the start of a marvelous evening.

 

 

 

 

Jan 31: Brief stop back at Fontainbleau

Last week, when I composed the post on the Garden of Diana at Fontainebleau, I searched through my many, many photos in vain for a particular photo of the garden of Diana that I took in October.

I found it tonight. When I took this photo, I was standing at the window of Marie Antoinette's boudoir, looking out. The naturalistic plantings that are there now date only to the mid-19th century so she never saw it quite like this--but the statue of Diana was there.

Something that isn't said often enough about Marie Antoinette--she had exquisite taste. While it is true that she had all the money in the world to spend on beautiful things and the best advice in the country, still, the furniture she commissioned, the rooms she decorated--like her shimmering boudoir--are exquisite. You can just spot the faucets of her bathtub through the glass window.

Jan 26: Garden plans at Fontainebleau

The Grand Parterre at Fountainbleau is lined with an herbaceous border, and we lingered over it. Though summer was over and plantings were a bit kitty-wumpus, we could still make out the basic plan though the weeds: two plantings side by side in alternating 5' squares with higher plants in the middle.

These two plans were repeated throughout the garden, and the gardeners even provided a useful plan (including the specific plants!) We recognized begonias, dahlias, zinnias, anthemis, cleome, heliotrope, ornamental grasses...anyhow, it was lovely AND inspirational. I have a corner of my garden, full sun, about 5' square...

Jan 25: Garden of Diane at Fontainebleau

The pretty jardin de Diane, the Garden of Diane, was created during the reign of Henri IV (1589-1610) as his private garden.

The King and Queen could look out on the Diana fountain from their bedrooms, and the garden was enclosed by other buildings--Louis XIV added an orangerie.

Napoleon I transformed the garden from the French formal style (with straight paths, rectangular flower beds centered on fountains and decorated with statues and potted plants) to the fashionable landscape garden à la anglais (with winding paths and naturalistic plantings), and the buildings that enclosed it were knocked down during the reign of Louis Philippe (1830 - 1848)--doubling the size of the garden. The garden was opened to the public after the fall of Napoleon III in 1870.

The current bronze statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt-- with a young deer and hunting dogs--was made by Tommaso Francini in 1684. He was a master fountain-maker, and the engineering of the statue--with its peeing dogs and spitting deer--was remarkable. The dogs have been in the Louvre for some time, and only recently restored to Fontainebleau.

The original statue of Diana, from 1603, is in a room that was closed to the public when we were at Fontainebleau.

Jan 24: Gardens at Fontainebleau

Not surprisingly, the gardens at Fontainebleau have changed a great deal since the 17th century. 

It's interesting to compare the modern gardens with an early 17th century etching. 

The pond with its pavilion (from 1662) remains, but the formal paths next to the pond became a jardin anglais around 1810. The little island was covered with water. 

The Grand Parterre--the largest in Europe--was laid out (as shown in the earlier plan) under Henri IV, but was redesigned as a French garden with a central fountain by Andre Le Notre and Louis Le Vau between 1660 - 1664. Its formal box hedges disappeared under Louis XV.
The canal of Henri IV, from 1608, starts beyond the parterre. Trees still line the canal, but traces of other features are found nearby. 

Jan 22: Flowers, flowers every where

I love all the flowers that one encounters in England and France.

The first image is of a simple bouquet of nasturiums at Charleston, the home of Virgina Woolf's sister, Vanessa.

The second is a bouquet of silk flowers in our chambre in Provins.

The third is a bouquet that we came across at Vaux-le-Vicomte. 

Oct 25: Chantilly--English landscape gardens

When the Prince de Condé-Bourbon returned to Chantilly in 1815, he had lived in exile in England for 20-some years where he discovered the English landscape garden that had become the fashion in the mid-18th century.

Thus, he replaced the lost Le Notre gardens and the Orangerie with an English landscape garden--lawns, curving walks, distant views, aesthetically placed clumps and scatterings of trees, serpentine lakes, follies.

Basically, the English landscape garden improved nature.

Lovely, in any case. 

Sept 29: Brighton--day 2: The Brighton Pavilion & Brighton Museum

We lazed around in the morning, chatting of shoes and ships and sealing wax and cabbages and kings, Finally, we got ourselves organized and walked the several miles of charmingly English streets of Brighton to the North Laines (where we had fish and chips for lunch.)

Then we toured the Royal Pavilion--that astonishing and unique building--and visited the Brighton Museum.

The museum--housed in the bones of the old Royal Stables--contains several satisfying collections: a furniture collection with some beautiful piece, a small set of Egyptian artifacts (collected by a Brighton native who became one of the 19th century's foremost Egyptologists,) a collection associated with Brighton's history--including a beautiful boat model--and the quirky Willet collection of pottery.

We also took in a small exhibit of Jane Austen's connections to Brighton and the regency (slight and assumed0 but the artifacts were engaging.

We walked home, too--a total of 10,000 steps--after a cup of tea at a local coffee shop.