- Rendez-vous de l'Institut
- Conference
Les Jardins de Schwetzingen (Bade-Wurttemberg) ou quand un jardin à la française se marie avec un jardin à l’anglaise by Emmanuel DUCAMP – Château de Bénouville
The Schwetzingen gardens (Bade-Wurttemberg), or when a formal French garden rubs shoulders with a landscaped English garden
“All that makes the beauty and the enhancement of a garden, i.e. the varieties of its borders, the intelligence and the regularity of its outline and distribution, the orderly composition of the whole, glimpses, viewpoints, alignments, various aspects, such as the contrast between the wild, the rural and the cultivated (…), in a word, all collectively comprise and characterise these gardens”.
This description of the Schwetzingen gardens, written in the 18th century, could barely be improved, even today. Now located to the north of Bade-Wurttemberg, the gardens were once in the heart of the Palatinate state and are one of the major works created by one of its prince-electors, Carl Theodor von der Pfalz (1724-1799) and his French architect Nicolas de Pigage (1723-1796). Created between 1745 and 1780, enhanced with one of the finest collections of “follies” from existing gardens in France and Europe, to represent the passageway between harmonious unity, from one world to another, from order and symmetry to supposedly natural disorder…
Emmanuel Ducamp
A Law and History of Art graduate from the University of Paris X, Emmanuel Ducamp was editorial director for Alain de Gourcuff Editeur in Paris from 1992 to 2001. In this capacity, he coordinated the publication of a series of works on Russian architecture, decorative art and art in the 18th and 19th centuries. With Oleg Neverov, curator of the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg, he contributed towards the production of Grandes collections de la Russie impériale and directed the publication of Tsarskoïe Selo, a major work on the palace and gardens of this Imperial summer residence. He also published Saint-Pétersbourg, a major reference book on the town and its palaces’ general history and architecture. Since gardens are one of the subjects he cherishes most, Emmanuel Ducamp has for a long time developed an interest in Imperial and aristocratic parks in Russia, of which he has also published a number of watercolours under conservation in Russian museum collections. Professor at the École du Louvre, he regularly gives conferences on Russian or French subjects in England and the United States (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; J.-Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; San Francisco Museum of Art, etc.). Member of the Association des Parcs Botaniques de France (Association of French Botanical Parks) and the Société des Amateurs de Jardins (Garden Amateurs’ Society), Emmanuel Ducamp is also president of the Association Paris-Saint-Pétersbourg, which promotes cultural exchange between France and Russia.
Further reading :
Saint-Pétersbourg, Citadelles et Mazenod, 2012
Tsarskoïe Selo, Swan Editeur, 2010 et Thames & Hudson, 2012
Grandes collections de la Russie impériale, Flammarion, 2004