Classic Garden Styles
By Eugenia Parray
French Formalism at the Great Chateaus
As I gaze at the failure of my potato crop this year, I’m finding comfort in thoughts of Edenic gardens that seemed to transcend error, where the illusion of perfection was absolute. I’m reflecting on great formal gardens, à la française: the vast parks near Paris designed by André Le Nôtre (1613–1700), who over decades perfected a supremely “unnatural” design, with a strict adherence to geometric symmetry, for the royal gardens of chateaus like Versailles and Saint Cloud.In the 1920s photographer Eugène Atget (1857–1927) haunted these places. By then they were public spaces and somewhat neglected and overgrown in places. In early morning, without the tourists, Atget rediscovered their magic. His wooden view-camera, stable on a tripod, held glass-plate negatives with slow, old-fashioned chemistries, a process he preferred—photographing for him was a form of contemplation. Like a marksman, under the dark cloth he sited vast perspectives, sweeping axes, scores of fountains, meticulously manicured plantings, and huge reflecting pools mourned by weeping foliage. He then selectively recomposed these elements into equivalent photographic geometries, as abstract as playing cards.(2)Atget’s sharp eye reminds us that nothing in these gardens was accidental. Superior intelligences that loved to regulate and clarify drove their creation and maintenance. Le Nôtre, super-confident scion of generations of gardeners employed by the state (he grew up in a house in the Tuileries), was hired to devise an original kind of beauty based strictly on compass and rule. To glorify Louis XIV, Le Nôtre drew up plans for the gardens of Versailles that look like sumptuous board games. He converted over 800 hectares into luscious lawns and dizzying vistas, bisected by a giant canal, lined with terraces, and punctuated by more than two hundred sculptures of mythological subjects and themes, with particular emphasis on Apollo, to reaffirm the absolute power of the Sun King.The expense was astronomical. Regiments of gardeners planted and maintained the grounds. Armed with shears, they swiftly barbered any naturally protruding leaves or branches to conform to triangles and circles. Imagine a garden conceived like a chessboard, where the trees are manicured daily to conform to an idea. These gardens had nothing to do with the enjoyment of the French public. In fact, they notoriously drained the national treasury and left the general population starving. The trimmed and raked gravel paths existed exclusively to please, and to exalt the supremacy of, the king and his family, besides providing settings for the famously licentious dalliances of some 2,000 powder-wigged members of his retinue.Versailles’ extravagant silliness included children. Presumably to teach Louis XIV’s eldest son, Louis of France, the Grand Dauphin, to read, Le Nôtre constructed a labyrinth with 39 playing fountains distributed along the hedged maze. Each fountain displayed a plaque printed with one of Aesop’s fables. In this way the boy, and perhaps his siblings and playmates from the court, could follow the pathways and puzzle through Aesop’s moral lessons. The outdoor school was short-lived. Water for so many fountains required some 250 pumps and 14 waterwheels to transport it over nearly a mile to the site. The dauphin’s labyrinth eventually suffered in a flush of economy. It was demolished after five years: too expensive to maintain.The Sun King poured money into Versailles, ignoring the needs of his subjects, but the real scarcity for him was water. For all the fountains, cascades, reflecting pools, etc., there simply wasn’t enough. Also, the hydraulic system, taxed to the limit, required constant maintenance. The men in charge, so called “fountaineers,” secretly rationed the water and limited use of the system. They wore whistles to signal one another when they learned that the king was about to pass a series of fountains so they could turn them on in succession before he arrived and, as soon as he passed by, turn them off.(3)Versailles was in many ways a grand illusion. Its rigid display expressed uncompromising adherence to authoritarianism. All of the vistas were theatrical stages designed to place Louis XIV at the apex. In the end, such places became symbols of punishable waste. With every revolution in France, the people ran to Versailles and slaughtered the trees. At Saint Cloud in 1871, they burned down the chateau. Nothing to eat. Kill the King! I, holding some very small potatoes, can hardly blame them.
Notes
These words were spoken by Le Nôtre’s character in the 2015 film A Little Chaos, directed by Alan Rickman. In this romantic bit of historical froth, the great designer (played by Matthias Schoenaerts) is so confident of his dominance as principal landscape architect at Versailles that he defies precedent and invites a skilled female gardener (Kate Winslet) to design a cascade in a secondary part of the gardens, thereby adding “a little chaos” of the feminine to parry the strict rigidity of Le Nôtre’s geometry.
For Atget’s photographs of Versailles and Saint Cloud, see John Szarkowski’s and Maria Morris Hambourg’s four-volume, fully illustrated compendium, The Work of Atget, particularly vol. III, The Ancien Regime(Museum of Modern Art, 1983).
I am indebted to the well-researched Wikipedia article on the Gardens of Versaillesfor some of the anecdotes recounted here.