Royal Palaces and Parks of France

by M. F. Mansfield

It was not long now before the "style pompadour" began to make itself shown with regard to garden design—the exaggeration of an undeniable grace by an affected mannerism. All the rococco details which had been applied to architecture now began to find their duplication in the garden rockeries—weird fantasies built of plaster and even shells of the sea.

By later years of the eighteenth century there came on the scene as a designer of gardens one, De Neufforge. His work was a prelude to the classicism of the style of Louis XVI which was to come. There was, too, at this time a disposition towards the English garden, but only a slight tendency, though towards 1780 the conventional French garden had been practically abandoned. The revolution in the art of garden-making therefore preceded that of the world of politics by some years.

There are three or four works which give specific details on these questions. They are "De la Distribution des Maisons de Plaisance," by Blondel (1773), his "Cours d'Architecture" of the same date, and Panseron's volume entitled "Recueil de Jardinage," published in 1783.

The following brief résumé shows the various steps through which the French formal garden passed. In the moyen-age the garden was a thing quite apart from the dwelling, and was but a diminutive dooryard sort of a garden. The garden of the Renaissance amplified the regular lines which existed in the moyen-age, but was often quite as little in accord with the dwelling that it surrounded as its predecessor.

The union of the garden and the dwelling and its dependencies was clearly marked under Louis XIV, while the gardens of Louis XV tended somewhat to modify the grand lines and the majestic presence of those of his elder. These gardens of Louis XV were more fantastic, and followed less the lines of traditional good taste. Shapes and forms were complicated and indeed inexplicably mixed into a mélange that one could hardly recognize for one thing or another, certainly not as examples of any well-meaning styles which have lasted until to-day. The straight line now disappeared in favour of the most dissolute and irrational curves imaginable, and the sober majesty of the gardens of Louis XIV became a tangle of warring elements, fine in parts and not uninteresting, effective, even, here and there, but as a whole an aggravation.

Finally the reaction came for something more simple and more in harmony with rational taste.

The best example remaining of the Louis XV garden is that which surrounds the Pavillon de Musique of the Petit Trianon, an addition to the garden which Louis XIV had given to the Grand Trianon. By comparison with the big garden of Le Notre this latter conception is as a boudoir to a reception hall.

The garden of Louis XVI was a composite, with interpolations from across the Rhine, from Holland and Belgium and from England even; features which got no great hold, however, but which, for a time, gave it an air less French than anything which had gone before.

From the beginning of the nineteenth century the formal garden was practically abandoned in France. It was the period of the real decadence of the formal garden. This came not from one cause alone but from many. To the straight lines and gentle curves of former generations upon generations of French gardens were added sinuosities as varied and complicated as those of the Vale of Cashmere, and again, with tiny stars and crescents and what not, the ground resembled an ornamental ceiling more than it did a garden. The sentimentalism of the epoch did its part, and accentuated the desire to carry out personal tastes rather than build on traditionally accepted lines. The taste for the English garden grew apace in France, and many a noble plantation was remodelled on these lines, or rooted up altogether. Immediately neighbouring upon the dwelling the garden still bore some resemblance to its former outlines, but, as it drew farther away, it became a park, a wildwood or a preserve.

Isabey Père, a miniaturist, under Napoleonic stimulus, designed a number of French gardens in the early years of the nineteenth century, following more or less the conventional lines of the best work of the seventeenth century, and succeeded admirably in a small way in resuscitating the fallen taste. Isabey's gardens may have lacked much that was remarkable in the best work of Le Notre, but they were considerably better than anything of a similar nature, so far as indicating a commendable desire to return to better ideals.