Chinoiserie notecards in World of Interiors

In the better-late-than-never department, we would be remiss if we didn't note the March issue of World of Interiors, which featured Aglae Auersperg's watercolors of her family's Chinese pavilion in the gardens at Vlašim, a Bohemian estate in the modern-day Czech Republic. The pavilion (above) has been impeccably restored and the watercolors are atmospheric and charming, and the issue was, as usual, intriguing, informative and visually stunning.

The issue's Inspiration page featured our boxed Tea House silhouette notecards and one of our folding cards reproducing our watercolor of the Pagoda at Rheinsberg, which once stood an extensive eighteenth-century folly garden created by Prince Heinrich of Prussia, brother of Frederick the Great.

A Year of Pagodas agenda

As a part of our first season of paper products for Libretto Group, we have also designed an agenda, A Year of Pagodas, that features a dozen spreads of our Chinoiserie fantasy watercolors, one for each month of the year (below is a sample spread for October).

Pagodas is a B5 format, hardbound notebook (7" x 10") with 144 ruled pages, twelve double-page spreads and a ribbon marker.

The cover features a crisp blue-and-white toile de Jouy pattern, reversed for the endpapers (bottom), which also include a whimsical bookplate. The page ends are gilded and each month's ten lined pages are crowned with that month's pagoda silhouetted in miniature.

As with the other items in the collection, please follow this link to find a retailer near you or contact Libretto Group directly.

A Beautiful Fall

In this autumn of our discontent, when today's Washington Post lead headline reads "United in anger, 'Occupy' protests go global," it seems a fitting moment to discuss the garden architecture of pre-revolutionary France. You may smile—indeed we hope you do—but also do recognize that the two subjects are far from being non sequiturs and in fact the garden buildings erected for the aristocracy during the reign of Louis XVI foreshadow later events as presciently as any scandals or political machinations of the period.

Lest we forget, in 1663 Colbert had advised the young Louis XIV (well before he had done anything of serious note) that nothing would increase a monarch's reputation more than glorious exploits in war and building impressive monuments. War and building were uttered in the same breath and indeed were twin pillars of the Sun King's reign: architecture held the highest strategic importance and building was a tool second only to war in the state's policy arsenal. (Below: Versailles, what Louis XIV built to amuse himself.)

As Louis XIV's legacy played out, his successor, Louis XV, naturally timid and reclusive, built intimate pavilions rather than palaces, the pendulum swinging in the mid 18th century to its opposite apogee. In part this was because his predecessor had bankrupted France with his wars and his monuments—to which Louis XV was obliged to add his own, without ever undertaking the necessary reforms to support them. The perpetual, unstated bankruptcy of the state, thrown to a crisis pitch after the disaster of the Seven Years' War, would mean that bills simply were not paid—not that expenses were seriously curtailed. Royal architects, clerks and draftsmen worked years without pay; gardeners starved and finally deserted; maintenance was deferred and broken windows were replaced by oiled paper. The king would most famously say, "Après moi le déluge," and he could not have been more correct, or more cynical. (Below: the Petit Trianon, what Louis XV built to amuse himself.)

Louis XVI, even more timid and maladroit than his predecessor, built next to nothing. (The Sun King's great legacy and burden had run to ground, perfectly illustrating the old adage of "Clogs to clogs in three generations," but in this instance the fortune built and squandered by the Bourbons was that of Europe's richest and most populous nation.) It was Louis XVI's queen, Marie-Antoinette, who commissioned nearly all royal building during the reign, to the extent that she provoked scandal by creating the position of first architect to the queen. (Below: the Marlborough Tower at the hameau, what Louis XVI's wife built to amuse herself while the king amused himself with clockworks.)

The manifest decadence of her elaborate farmers' hamlet at Trianon, le hameau, whose rustic stucco walls were cracked and aged by artisans, provoked the scorn and ire of her subjects, who rightly saw a queen playing milkmaid with Sevres jugs at Versailles while there were bread riots in Paris as contempt for their plight. Likewise, the hameau was taken as certain proof that consideration of the people's opinion did not even cross their rulers' minds; even hypocrisy would have been preferred to having simply been forgotten—or in the queen's case, to having never entered her consciousness at all. It is safe to say that the hameau, along with the infamous diamond necklace scandal, cost the queen her head exactly 218 years ago today. (Below: a Sevres milk bowl and stand, commissioned by Marie-Antoinette for the dairy at Rambouillet.)

More broadly, though, the last decade before the revolution witnesses the French aristocracy—or more accurately that portion of it attached to the court—building ever more elaborate gardens and shoehorning onto them ever more and ever more exotic follies. The competition was fierce and a desperate rage for exoticism gripped the players. Here we quote from our first book, Pleasure Pavilions and Follies:

These late follies offered a boundless repertoire of imagery: pagodas evoked the Orient, innumerable thatched huts hearkened to Edenic idylls, farm villages presented a supremely false vision of peasant life, temples and rotundas echoed the Ancients. All the world and all its cultures were plundered to provide adornments for a nobleman's garden, leading the prince de Ligne to bemoan in 1781 that "Chinese buildings reek of the boulevards and sideshow fairs," and that "Gothic houses, too, are becoming too common." He proposed instead the hitherto untapped ornamental possibilities of Moldavian huts and allowed that Arab and Turkish styles had not yet been exhausted.

(Below: the mosque at Armainvilliers, built for the princesse de Lamballe, intimate of the queen, by an indulgent father who also happened to be the richest man in France.)

De Ligne, another intimate of the queen and someone for whom the oxymoron "profoundly frivolous" could have been coined, had captured the zeitgeist perfectly; in fact, he incarnated it, bragging that he ordered all his follies and suits on credit.

This decadence also expressed itself financially, as it always does. De Ligne, like the baron de Saint-James, the duc de Choiseul and others, bankrupted himself on his gardens, just as, in the late 1780s, the French state was borrowing against projected tax receipts decades hence. If one stops to ponder, it is simply extraordinary that someone like the duc de Choiseul, who ruled France for over a decade as de facto Prime Minister for Louis XV, could bankrupt himself at all, and that he had done so upon a garden. All these élites throwing all their money into gardens, their progeny be damned—quite the spectacle. And what is a garden in the end but a useless fantasy, a cipher for Eden, for paradise, an escape?

(Below: the Lake Pagoda at the Folie Saint-James, which, as its name indicates, stood on wooden pilings sunk into an artificial lake, and was reached by a fretwork Chinoiserie skiff.)

These bankruptcies showed great determination, since the élite had abandoned both traditional stone construction and the cheaper but inferior method of rubble-fill and stucco as well. They had also abandoned the formal French garden of Le Nôtre for Anglo-Chinese folly gardens and also for Masonic gardens, since they had also abandoned the Church and freemasonry was rampant. They built for novelty and effect, not permanence. They erected literally hundreds of flimsy stick-and-lathe structures, crass bastardizations of the world's native cultures, from pagodas to teepees, most of which would not survive the next decade let alone the next century. Or they squandered immense sums on absurdities such as an enormous boulder destined for a grotto in the baron de Saint-James' garden—a stone that required 40 draft horses to drag from the forest of Fontainebleau to Neuilly. (Louis XVI came upon the Sisyphean scene while hunting and, flabbergasted, inquired about the owner, and thereafter referred to Saint-James—who died a pauper in the Bastille—as "the man with the rock.")

Fake tombs and real hermits were also much in vogue. The princesse de Monaco, mistress of the prince de Condé, commissioned an entire "Valley of the Tombs" for her estate of Betz and also kept a hermit, who was forbidden to speak, to animate her thatch-roofed ermitage. The marquis de Girardin also kept a hermit, whose ermitage was praised in a guide for its Spartan furnishings, and moreover the marquis had the great good fortune that his most famous guest, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, died while visiting Ermenonville, permitting him to inter the great writer in a pseudo-antique sarcophagus on a small island in the lake fronting his château, making Rousseau's corpse the ultimate in morbid garden ornaments-cum-prizes. (Above: Girardin's Spartan-chic ermitage at Ermenonville; below: Rousseau's tomb.)

The list of instances of wretched excess and breathtaking decadence, of abandoned traditions and frivolous dilettantism, of willful blindness and stunning naïveté, of callous inhumanity and ostentatious self-gratification could go on for volumes, and this is only history as told through garden follies. The revolution, when it came, swept over France with unparalleled fury; hideous vengeance was exacted and it required well over a century for the country to settle finally into stable democratic rule. We'll leave it at that.

Garden Tents

One of the most evocative symbols of summer is the garden tent, so it's the perfect subject for July's first post.

In the late eighteenth century, Europeans considered tents the most characteristic of Oriental structures and erected them prolifically in their gardens, indiscriminately labeling them as Tartar, Turkish, Siamese or Chinese. There was a kernel of truth in this notion since nomadic tents are indeed the origin of the Chinese pagoda's characteristically concave, upturned roof—though it is highly doubtful that any European gardener of the period knew this.

As picturesque as they were inexpensive, tents became a staple of Anglo-Chinese folly gardens and a number of them, such as the Tartar Tent at the Parc Monceau in Paris (above) were even constructed of permanent materials. Sheathed in trompe l'œil tole-work (painted tin sheet-metal), this tent was actually an open-air alcove and part of a wing added to the main pavilion; dense plantings to either side hid the connecting passageways from view. Built circa 1775, it was also the first of its kind, inspiring similar tole-work tents at the Désert de Retz and at Haga and Drottningholm in Sweden.

The Parc Monceau, the Duc de Chartres' folly garden, which today is a Parisian city park, also featured this extraordinary draped canvas tent (above); nearby was a stand with turbaned lackeys offering camel rides (below).

These engraved scenes of Monceau by Carmontelle, the park's designer, are among our favorites: they carefully record the slightly mad clutter of this Ancien Régime Disneyland and are peopled by elaborately clothed and bewigged visitors, perfectly capturing the atmosphere of slightly absurd refinement that reigned in French folly gardens. Just how self-consciously aburdist or surreal Monceau actually was is in fact quite difficult to judge; consider, for example, that no structure was more characteristic of the countryside of the period than a windmill just like the folly depicted in the lower view—it would be comparable to building a suburban split-level in a landscape garden today.

Ephemeral garden tents became extremely fashionable at Versailles during the reign of Louis XVI, as their ease of construction, inherent theatricality and low cost made them the perfect foil for the numerous, equally extravagant fêtes hosted by Marie-Antoinette at Trianon. Elaborate garden parties, often spanning a week's festivities, were an ancient royal tradition and were first mounted at Versailles by Louis XIV in the late 1600s. In contrast to the baroque pomp of the Sun King, Marie-Antoinette transformed the landscape gardens of Trianon into a rustic, illuminated wonderland for her famed evening garden parties. (Below, the Belvedere during one of these "illuminations.")

Popular rumor was such that after the Parisian mob stormed Versailles in 1789, among the first demands of the deputies of the Third Estate was to examine the Queen’s garden tents, which they believed fashioned of precious fabrics encrusted with gold and silver. The reality, retrieved from the store rooms of the Menus plaisirs, was more worthy of the stage than royalty: painted canvases hung with pasteboard decorations.

Another Small Jewel

Buildings such as this are the reason we chose to dedicate our work to garden architecture: their garden settings allow their architects a license to dream, creating—in the best of circumstances—small, virtually unknown masterpieces that are nonetheless unforgettable once you have encountered them.

This miniature neo-Palladian pantheon, the Temple of Friendship at Pringy, distills one of architecture's most potent archetypes and limns it with one of architecture's most haunting styles. All the more remarkable as the architect himself is quite obscure—Soufflot the Younger, nephew to the great French mid-18th century architect, Jacques-Germain Soufflot—author of another, much grander and world-famous Pantheon in Paris.

As is often the case with garden follies—though in this case the building has more powerful a presence than what those words might conjure—the Temple of Friendship has a charming back-story: commissioned by the friends of the Duchess of Gontaut-Biron and erected on her estate of Pringy, located near Melun to the south of Paris, during her extended absence in 1785. Today, it is difficult to imagine the generosity and complexity of such an extravagant gesture, so characteristic of the aristocracy of the Ancien Régime.

And the building itself is simply and forcefully detailed with a severe, stripped-down and abstracted classicism that is clearly Palladian but also offers intimations of the Revolutionary-era architecture of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux. The cream-white stucco work plays masterfully against the reddish rubble walls, and those walls as well as the stuccoed wall of the temple front are battered, or angled slightly outward, giving the building its remarkable sense of presence.

Finally, a shameless plug: if you haven't done so, please do visit the new page on our main site, Latest Work, where we present a number of our most recent watercolors (this one among them).

Russian Follies and Pavilions

One of the great cultural revelations to occur in the aftermath the collapse of the Soviet Union two decades ago was the West's rediscovery of St. Petersburg and its great imperial estates.

First and oldest is Peterhof, the residence of the city's founder and namesake, Peter the Great, built on the shores of the Neva Bay of the Gulf of Finland, Russia's maritime corridor to Europe and the raison d'être of St. Petersburg itself.

Below, the cascades at Peterhof.

To the southeast are Tarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk: the former the Russian Versailles, magisterial and imprinted with the remarkable personality of Catherine (II) the Great, and later the bourgeois taste of her grandson, Alexander I; the latter the exquisite neo-Palladian estate of her ill-fated son, Paul I, and his widowed Empress, Maria Feodorovna.

At top, the Caprice or Krestovy Bridge at Tarskoye Selo and below, the Pavilion of the Three Graces by Cameron at Pavlovsk.

Oranienbaum, the baroque hunting estate of Catherine II—originally built for Duke Aleksandr Menshikov, boon companion to Peter the Great and de facto czar during the reign of Catherine I—is to the west near the Neva Bay. Though built on a monumental scale that is typically Russian, Oranienbaum is nonetheless the most intimate and rustic of all the imperial estates and that most in harmony with nature.

Below, the Peterhof Gate at Oranienbaum.

Finally, there is the outlying estate of Gatchina, the vast neoclassical palace Catherine II ordered built for her lover, Count Orlov, and which she graciously repurchased from his heirs for her son Paul upon Orlov's death. Gatchina is as far again to the south of Tarskoye Selo as it in turn is from St. Petersburg, its relative isolation (with that of Oranienbaum) causing it to suffer from a chronic lack of funds for its complete restoration.

Below, the monumental ruins of the Aviary at Gatchina.

Peterhof, Tarskoye Selo and Gatchina are palaces conceived on a scale rivaling Versailles and Fontainebleau, but were used solely as residences; there was no precedent in Russia for the court living in attendance on the czar. And all five of these estates feature formal gardens and landscape parks scattered with an unparalleled variety of pavilions, garden follies and monuments in Easter-egg colors, the work of a host of foreign architects—predominately Italian, later British—who brought to Russia the architectural knowledge it so sorely lacked. The Italians—Rastrelli, Rinaldi and Rossi—designed palaces and pavilions of such baroque exuberance that they have few counterparts even in Italy, and later the Scottish architect Cameron and the Italian Quarenghi designed a host of serenely proportioned neoclassical structures for Catherine the Great and Paul I at Tarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk.

Below, Rastrelli's spectacular Hermitage Pavilion in the Catherine Park of Tarskoye Selo.

Whether baroque or neoclassical, these imperial estates are all follies in the broadest sense; there is little or no contrast, as in France, between the sober palace and its garden buildings, but rather the palaces themselves are often more gilded, more colorful, more ornate, more plastic—in short, more exuberant—than the follies in their parks. Consider below, the chapel at Peterhof: