Château de Louveciennes
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The Château de Louveciennes in Louveciennes, Yvelines, is composed of the château itself, constructed at the end of 17th century then expanded and redecorated by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Mme du Barry, and the music (or reception) pavilion constructed by Claude Nicolas Ledoux (1770–71), in the middle of a park that was devised in the 19th century.
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[edit] The château
In 1684 Louis XIV ordered the construction of a château in the proximity of an aqueduct built to bring water drawn from the Seine by the Machine de Marly to the Château de Marly. The king gave the building to Baron Arnold de Ville, the engineer of Liège who had conceived the hydraulic installation.
This château is an approximately cubic construction, of average size and modest appearance, which borders the chemin de la Machine (n° 6), a favourite subject of the Impressionists Camille Pissarro and Alfred Sisley.
In 1769, Louis XV offered the château to his new favorite, Mme du Barry. She probably called upon Ange-Jacques Gabriel, Premier Architecte du Roi, to increase and redecorate the building. This addition was the adjoining eastern wing, as well as the decoration of carved woodwork.
In the 1980s, the château was acquired by a Japanese company, the Nippon Sangyo, as a commercial asset. The company sold all the furniture and left the building abandoned. Occupied by squatters, the château underwent various degradations. In 1994 an attempt to remove the joinery and a chimneypiece was thwarted by the police. The owner then put the property up for sale and it was bought by a French investor who carefully restored it.
[edit] The pavilion
The château was disadvantaged by lacking a view of the Seine. Moreover, Mme du Barry considered the reception areas to be inadequate. She thus decided to build, surveying the valley of the Seine, a small separate house that would include reception rooms, the famous Pavillon de Louveciennes.
[edit] History
Proposals were requested of Charles de Wailly and Claude Nicolas Ledoux. In spite of the negative opinions given by several of her circle, notably Gabriel, Mme du Barry decided to retain the project of Ledoux, then at the beginning of his career. The design was completed in 1770 and construction was carried out in 1771.
The inauguration took place on September 2, 1771 in the presence of the King. A play by Charles Collé was performed, La partie de chasse de Henri IV,[1] and dinner was served with music (the musicians complained about the exiguity of the platforms of the dining room, now shut off by mirrors) followed by a display of fireworks.
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. The death of Louis XV in 1774 put an end to this project before it was begun.
The pavilion thus remained in its original state until the second half of the 19th century. On an unspecified date, it was disfigured by the addition of a Mansard roof and shutters to the windows.
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. François Coty called upon the architect Charles Mewès to displace it several meters. This radical solution saved the building from erosion of the slope, which would have entirely destroyed it within the next few years. 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.
In 1959, the house was bought by the American School in Paris who then settled there. In cleaning the building some Nazi materials were found. The story was that while the Nazis maintained a headquarters in the building during their WW II occupation the French resistance was active in the old mine tunnels that were below the grounds of the building. These mines had provided some of the stone used to build Paris. And it was these mines that caused the American School to move to another site in Garche. The school wanted to expand by putting up new buildings but the underlying tunnels made the ground unstable. A project was initiated to pump cement into the tunnels but this was abandoned when the alternate school site became available.
[edit] Architecture
The pavilion of Louveciennes is one of the most successful achievements of Ledoux and a prototype for neoclassical architecture.
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 Mlle Guimard on the roadway of Antin. The coffered domes would have been an astonishing feature to Parisians, Eriksen has observed. It leads to a room which has the form of a square with apsidal ends, intended as a dining room, where the inaugural dinner took place. Behind this room is an enfilade of three living rooms, the central salon du Roi flanked by salons that are each of a different plan, opening onto the view of the Seine below. Various services and the kitchen were established in the rusticated half-basement.
The side towards the Seine is known from a drawing made by the British neoclassicist Sir William Chambers:[2] 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. Ledoux's commemorative engraving of 1804[3] carries the severe façade right across, unbroken; Ledoux's drawings, executed long afterwards, cannot be trusted to represent the original appearance, according to Svend Eriksen (Eriksen 1974:62, 66), because the architect was in the habit of furnishing his drawings "with impossibly advanced features retrospectively." 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" (Eriksen 1974:66).
[edit] Interior decoration
The interiors were finished and furnished with exceptional elegance. They had gilt-bronze wall-lights and other ornaments, designed by Ledoux in an advanced neoclassical taste and executed by Pierre Gouthière[4] and straight-legged chairs by the prominent menuisier Louis Delanois, in the neoclassical style we know as "Louis Seize". 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 pavillion 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 Moreau the Younger 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. The pilasters were of gray scagliola with gilt-bronze capitals supplied by Gouthière. The girandole lights suspended in front of the mirrors between the pilasters were semi-circular, so that with their reflection in the mirrors they appeared to be circular chandeliers hanging in space, a useful trompe l'oeil to enlarge the somewhat cramped space, which was essentially an enlarged vestibule between the entrance and the Salon du Roi.
Mme du Barry commissioned from Jean-Honore Fragonard a suite of four large paintings for Louveciennes. The painter, who attached much importance to this commission, represented The Progress of Love in the Heart of Maidenhood. However, his masterpieces displeased the commissioner, supposedly because a youthful shepherd chasing nymphs on Fragonard's painting bore little resemblance to his prototype, the elderly and infirme king. After du Barry refused the paintings, Fragonard had them installed in 1790 in Grasse, in the salon of one of his cousins, Alexandre Maubert, whose grandson sold them in 1898 to the industrialist J. P. Morgan. Since 1915 they have been one of the gems of the Frick Collection in New York.
Mme du Barry commissioned from Joseph-Marie Vien replacement paintings on the same subject, now on exhibit at Musée du Louvre and Château de Chambéry. Vien's neoclassical manner was gaining in popularity at the time and appeared particularly appropriate for the decor she had created in Louveciennes.
[edit] The park
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 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. Both are now conserved in the Louvre Museum.
In 1852, the property was expanded to the banks of the Seine, but was divided into two lots. The first, including the château, was acquired by the banker Solomon Goldschmidt, whose heirs had it built upon by the architect Henri Goury, in 1898. The entry was in the Louis XV style, flanking the two houses, located at n° 6 chemin de la Machine. The same architect also built the stables.
The second lot included the pavilion by Ledoux, equipped with two entries built by the architect Pasquier (one, located n° 28 route de la Princesse and the other in Rennequin-Sualem quay in Bougival); it was acquired by a rich American from Baltimore, Alice Thal de Lancey, mistress of the banker Nissim de Camondo, who had met her through Arthur Meyer. Edmond de Goncourt made fun of "the ironic interior of Louveciennes, where Mme du Barry lived and where lives today Mme de Lancey and where the banker Camondo replaces Louis XV."[5]
The park contains two small temples:
- One, of the Ionic order, dates undoubtedly from the XVIIIth century and is sometimes attributed without proof to Ledoux or to Richard Mique;
- The other, of the Doric order, was built by the architect Henri Goury at the end of the XIXth century.
[edit] References
- Svend Eriksen, 1974. Early Neo-Classicism in France (London: Faber). Translated by Peter Thornton.
[edit] Notes
- ^ "The hunting-party of Henri IV".
- ^ Now in the Royal Institute of British Architects; it is Eriksen's plate 79. Chambers also made a careful pen-and-ink drawing of Ledoux's contemporaneous house for Mlle Guimard (Eriksen's plate 77).
- ^ The engravings were published by Ledoux in De 'l'architecture considérée sous le rapport des arts, des moeurs et de la législation, Paris, 1804 (noted in Eriksen 1974:62).
- ^ To the astonishing sum of 100,000 livres (Eriksen 1974: 188)
- ^ Edmond de Goncourt, Journal, 3 June 1882.
[edit] External links
Paintings by Joseph-Marie Vien for the Château de Mme du Barry (at the official site of the Musée du Louvre):
- (French) Amant couronnant sa maîtresse, 1773, 3,35 m x 2,02 m.
- (French) Jeunes Grecques parant de fleurs l'Amour endormi, 1773, 3,35 m x 1,94 m.
