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Le Jardin à la française : continuité d’un paysage qui éblouit by Eric HASKELL – Château de Bénouville
The formal French garden: continuity of a dazzling landscape
Over four decades, André le Nôtre forged the symbolic scenarios that were at the very heart of Louis XIV’s success in Versailles and in other royal residences elsewhere. The formal garden, his quintessential masterpiece, offered a brand new interpretation enhanced by a rich vocabulary of large aisles of embroidered borders and groves. Both imposing and avant-gardist, this conception of landscape – as aesthetic as it was political – offered a totally unique physiognomy to the Sun King’s reign. Le Nôtre’s fourth centenary anniversary offers us a fine opportunity to contemplate the influence of formalism throughout France and Europe, and even as far as America, to illustrate the great impact of this typically French conception of landscape to this very day.
Eric HASKELL
Eric Haskell is a professor in French studies at the Scripps College, Claremont University, California, where he is also director of the Clark Humanities Museum. He also studied history of art and architecture within the context of the higher education programme offered by the UCI and the École du Louvre in Paris. Dr Haskell’s lectures focus on the study of the political and social traditions that have shaped France. He has published around thirty works in English and French on a range of subjects, ranging from 19th century poetry to the history of gardens. In the specific field of the history of gardens and the aesthetics of landscape, Dr Haskell has organised over a dozen exhibitions.
Further reading :
Le Nôtre’s Gardens, RAM Publications, 1999
Les Jardins de Brécy: Le Paradis Retrouvé, Editions du Huitième Jour, 2007