André Le Nôtre

French architect

• Born: March 12, 1613
• Birthplace: Paris, France
• Died: September 15, 1700
• Place of death: Paris, France

Le Nôtre’s designs for great public gardens complement the architecture of many of the most important buildings in seventeenth century France. He virtually created the French formal garden, which subordinated nature to reason and order while maintaining a fascination with and awareness of nature’s beauty and delight.

Early Life

André Le Nôtre (ahn-dray leh noh-treh) was born in his father’s home, adjoining the Tuileries Gardens. His father, Jean Le Nôtre, royal master gardener, served the king, as had his father, and was in charge of a specific part of the royal gardens. Like all tradespeople of the time, gardeners were a close-knit group, handing their jobs from father to son for generations. Le Nôtre’s christening records substantiate that, for his godmother was the wife of Claude Mollet, a member of another third-generation gardening family that was then better known than the Le Nôtres.

Growing up amid this coterie of amateur and professional landscape architects and gardeners, the young Le Nôtre was undoubtedly influenced by their standards, and they probably even discussed his training and education. A prominent author, Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie, had set forth the qualifications needed by gardeners: literacy, mathematical training, and drawing skill. Drawing was necessary in order to reproduce embroidery patterns on the ground to serve as designs for flower beds. Geometry was necessary to measure paths and flower beds. If he wished, a gardener might study architecture to enable him to design structures for his garden. This theoretical training would be accompanied by the more practical study of seeds, soils, transplanting, and weather prediction.

Apparently, the youthful Le Nôtre showed such skill in drawing that his family arranged for him to study with Simon Vouet, the chief painter to King Louis XIII . This natural skill is apparent in Le Nôtre’s carefully executed and delicately colored garden plans, which exhibit draftsmanship and proportion characteristic of an artist. It is generally accepted that he must also have studied architecture, either with Jacques Lemercier or François Mansart . Judging by his later life, this education in painting and architecture must have been of a highly academic quality, accompanied by extensive reading in subjects such as optics, Turkish art, and Italian garden design.

After two years of architectural study, Le Nôtre began training as a gardener, serving as an apprentice to his father, who applied to Louis XIII to have his position passed to his son. The younger Le Nôtre went to work in the Tuileries, receiving his appointment, with a salary and a lodging in the park, in 1637. He remained in charge of these gardens all of his life, arranging for his nephews to inherit this responsibility after his death.

Even though Le Nôtre was a dashing and vivacious young man and lived in a notoriously amoral court atmosphere, no scandal was ever attached to his name. In 1640, he married Françoise Langlois, and his energies thereafter seem always to have been directed to his own family and to his work. He conducted both with discipline and humility. Their married life was happy as well as prosperous, although not untouched by sadness. Apparently neither their son nor their two daughters survived infancy. With no children of their own, Le Nôtre and Françoise cared for their nephews and nieces and a godchild. They also provided a home for his mother after Jean Le Nôtre’s death. In their later years, both Le Nôtres inherited property and land from their parents. As Le Nôtre’s reputation grew, he prospered, and ultimately he and his wife were wealthy, with an annual income equivalent to thirty-five thousand dollars.

Life’s Work

Le Nôtre’s work was known and admired by royalty, nobles, and his contemporaries as early as the 1640’s. When only in his early thirties, he conceived a witty and original plan for an episcopal garden at Meaux in the shape of a bishop’s miter. He had worked in the Luxembourg Gardens for Gaston, duc d’Orléans. His position as designer in ordinary of the king’s gardens continued unchanged after the death of Louis XIII and the ascension of Louis XIV . It is generally accepted, however, that real fame came to him as the designer of the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte for Nicolas Fouquet .

Fouquet, superintendent of finance for the Queen Mother, had amassed a huge fortune, which he spent on a château designed to be the most magnificent that money could achieve. He seems to have been anxious to overawe the young Louis XIV and commissioned Louis Le Vau as architect, Charles Le Brun as designer of furnishings, and Le Nôtre as designer of the gardens. They created a masterpiece. The palace stood amid one thousand acres of gardens and park. During its construction, three small villages disappeared, rivers were diverted, and a whole forest was transplanted. In August of 1661, Fouquet invited six thousand people, including the king and the whole court, to a grand party. There were fireworks, illuminations, fountains arching into the sky, and a play performed in the gardens, written and directed by French playwright Molière. Although Fouquet was arrested and imprisoned twenty days later, Le Nôtre’s triumph was undiminished. Furthermore, Louis XIV was apparently determined to build an even more magnificent palace at Versailles and to have the same three masters of art and architecture construct and design to their best ability, again with no regard for expense.

Ultimately, Louis XIII’s unremarkable hunting lodge at Versailles was transformed into the Louis XIV’s palace, the most extravagant and influential building and garden in European history. From its probable beginning date of 1662 throughout the rest of the king’s life, the expansion of the buildings, parks, and gardens of Versailles became symbolic of the aggrandizement of France under his rule. The growth of his power can be charted in the growing acreage added to the gardens and parks. The king himself was active in designing his new city. The axis of the gardens and avenues designed by Le Nôtre at Versailles—eventually eight miles of them—literally converged in the king’s apartment. The primary theme of the gardens and the sculptures therein is the mythology of Apollo, the original roi de soleil (sun king, a moniker for Louis XIV). Additionally, the four rivers of France appear as ancient water gods. The four seasons, the four parts of the day, the continents, the four elements, and the various gods of nature and mythology relate to the garden. The image of the Sun King’s supremacy was eventually translated into stone and marble, fabulous water displays, bosquets (thickets or groves), and grottoes, in a symbolism that was complex and unified in its focus.

At Versailles, Le Nôtre followed an essentially orderly geometrical formula from which he rarely deviated throughout his career. The gardens and the buildings they surrounded were an architectural unit. The château was the focal point in a plan beginning with a central axis that bisected the structure and stretched westward to the horizon. Although actually on several different levels, at Versailles this long vista seemed to stretch to its vanishing point, past fountains, secondary canals, and ultimately the mile-long, sixty-foot-wide Grand Canal. Poets of the day said that this vista formed a pathway to the heavens so that the sun god could descend to his earthly domain. To the architects of the palace and garden, this grand view expressed the limitless power of the king, the personification of France. At right angles across the axis were laid other vistas, geometrically balanced and equally perfect on a smaller scale.

The park at Versailles had three vistas: the main one, which extended to the west, and the ones that extended north and south. Each began at a parterre directly in front of the palace or its wings. These flower beds were planted to resemble embroidered fabric and were edged with low-growing shrubs. Rectangular green panels provided open spaces and led the eye to the many pools. Higher elements of relief, such as trees, were kept at a distance so as not to clutter the vista. The trees served to define the borders within the garden and to provide green walls for a series of cozy, intimate outdoor “rooms,” the bosquets, which often served as outdoor ballrooms, theaters, or concert halls.

To the south of the château was a second series of terraces that contained the orangerie, which was designed by Le Nôtre and built by Mansart. From there, tubs holding trees laden with oranges, pomegranates, flowering jasmine, and oleanders were wheeled out in spring to form part of the planned garden. The constructed lake visible from the upper terrace was Le Nôtre’s last work at Versailles, completed when he was seventy-four years old. North of the château, where the ground sloped sharply, was the third vista. Le Nôtre there showed his mastery of perspective, for he made the flower beds wedge shaped, with distant ones shorter and smaller and near ones larger, and with the longest sides of the triangles facing the château. Steps of rose-colored marble descended through a steep avenue, past two rows of fountains, through a wood, to reflecting pools, from which water rose in great spouts. This part of the garden also demonstrated the diversity of optical illusions of which Le Nôtre was capable, for when viewed from its farthest points the angle of ascent along the main axis was exaggerated by the luminous waters, the constant refraction of light, and the dazzling play of color in the greens of the woods, the sky-reflecting pools, and the gilded sculptures. All were planned and executed in a perfect harmony of proportion to be viewed from any point.

Le Nôtre’s distinguished career was marked by many honors. He became a member of the French Academy of Architecture in 1681. The king honored him with the Order of Saint-Michel, a great mark of distinction. Following Le Nôtre’s own whim, Louis XIV bestowed on him a coat of arms consisting of a gold chevron and three silver snails. Other architects and designers lost favor, but until his death Le Nôtre remained the honored friend of the king. Le Nôtre, as the king himself recognized, was like his gardens: honest, straightforward, balanced, and without pettiness. One painting of Le Nôtre in middle age shows a successful, bewigged man with a strong face, intelligent expression, and large dark eyes that seem about to smile. When he died at the age of eighty-seven, his obituary noted that “he was esteemed by all the sovereigns in Europe and there are few who have not requested the design of a garden from him.”

Significance

Le Nôtre did not invent the formal garden, but he did carry its pattern to a level of artistic grandeur that set a pattern for the rest of Europe. He advanced the architectural design of the Renaissance garden, which had been evolving in Italy for two hundred years, to its ultimate form. His imagination, coupled with his artistic perception and the mathematical clarityof his vision, created gardens that epitomized seventeenth century neoclassicism. He had traveled to Italy and conferred with the pope. He had laid out gardens in England for Charles II and William of Orange. Besides his masterpiece at Versailles, the gardens at Hampton Court, Clagny, Triauon, Sceaux, and Pont Chavtrain further testify to his greatness.

He left no personal literary record of his ideas, but his students were influential in France as well as in the rest of Europe for many years. Many of his gardens no longer exist in original form, but those that are unchanged show his brilliance. It was partly in reaction to his highly developed formality that the so-called romantic or English garden became popular in the more emotional eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Bibliography

Adams, William Howard. The French Garden, 1500-1800. New York: George Braziller, 1979. A work based on careful examination of documents and manuscripts of the period, as well as explorations of surviving sites. An extensive chapter tells of Le Nôtre’s life and his architectural and landscaping innovations.

Fox, Helen. André Le Nôtre: Garden Architect to Kings. New York: Crown, 1962. A good biography that presents Le Nôtre as a symbol of seventeenth century classicism. Includes color reproductions of Le Nôtre’s garden plans, sketches, and engravings of garden scenes, and a portrait of Le Nôtre.

Hadfield, Miles. Pioneers in Gardening. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1955. Examines the evolution of gardening as different from horticulture or botany. The chapter on the formal garden is almost totally devoted to Le Nôtre.

Hazlehurst, F. Hamilton. Gardens of Illusion: The Genius of André Le Nostre. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 1980. A scholarly and complete study of the life and work of Le Nôtre, whom Hazlehurst calls “Le Nostre,” consistent with seventeenth century spelling. Especially remarkable are the illustrations: contemporary engravings, artists’ views, and several plan and elevation drawings done to scale by a modern architect.

Jellicoe, Sir Geoffrey, Patrick Goode, Michael Lancaster, and Susan Jellicoe, eds. The Oxford Companion to Gardens. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. A comprehensive quick-reference volume containing condensed biographies of Le Nôtre and his major contemporaries. Especially important for its definitions of the many specialized terms associated with gardening, past and present.

Mariage, Thierry. The World of André Le Nôtre. Translated by Graham Larkin. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. Mariage, the architect in charge of Versailles Museum, Park and Gardens, examines Le Nôtre’s work within a social and cultural context, and describes how seventeenth century practices of land management, surveying, and hydrology contributed to Le Nôtre’s design.

Orsenna, Erik. André Le Nôtre: Gardener to the Sun King. Translated by Moishe Black. New York: George Braziller, 2001. Orsenna, a French novelist and head of the National School of Landscaping at Versailles, focuses on the design of the gardens of Versailles, examining the many facets of Le Nôtre’s landscaping style.

Weiss, Allen S. Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and Seventeenth Century Metaphysics. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995. A concise intellectual history of the function and meaning of Versailles and other French formal gardens.