Hameau de la reine

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La maison de la reine and the Tour de Malborough (left) in le hameau, at the Petit Trianon, park of Versailles

The Hameau de la Reine ("The Queen's hamlet") is the rustic retreat that was built for Marie Antoinette. It is situated in a secluded section of the Trianon gardens, within the park of Versailles, and adjoining the Petit Trianon, a small château designed and built by Ange-Jacques Gabriel for Louis XV's mistress, Madame de Pompadour . On his accession to the throne in 1774, Louis XVI gave to his wife, Queen Marie Antoinette.

Back of the Moulin, the watermill cottage built for Marie Antoinette

The hameau was small, rustic, and but in essence an ersatz farm (or ferme ornée) meant to evoke a peasant village in Normandy, built on the far side of a landscaped pond.[1] Created in 1783, to designs of the Queen's favoured architect, Richard Mique, the hamlet was complete with farmhouse, dairy, and mill. Here, it was said, the Queen and her attendants would dress as shepherdesses and milkmaids. Particularly docile, hand-picked cows would be cleaned. These cows would be milked by the ladies, with porcelain milk churns painted to imitate wood specially made by the royal porcelain manufactory at Sèvres. These churns and pails featured the Queen's monogram. The simple and rustic ambiance at the hameau has been evoked in paintings by Fragonard; however, inside the farmhouse, the rooms were far from simple, featuring the luxury and comfort to which Marie Antoinette and her ladies were accustomed. Yet, the rooms at the hameau allowed for more intimacy than the grand salons at Versailles, or at the Petit Trianon itself. Such model farms operating under principles espoused by the Physiocrats, were fashionable among the French aristocracy at the time, and one primary purpose of the hameau was to add to the ambiance of the Petit Trianon, giving the illusion that it was deep in the countryside rather than within the confines of Versailles.

A "cottage garden"

The garden surroundings of the Petit Trianon, of which the hameau de la Reine is an extension, began their transformation from formal pattern gardens to an informal "natural" garden of winding paths, curving canals and lakes in 1774, under the direction of Antoine Richard, gardener to the Queen.[2] Richard Mique modified the landscape plan to provide vistas of lawn to west and north of the Petit Trianon, encircled by belts of trees. Beyond the lake to the north, the hameau was sited like a garden stage set, initially inspired in its grouping and vernacular building by Dutch and Flemish genre paintings, philosophically influenced by Rousseau's cult of "nature", and reflecting exactly contemporary picturesque garden principles set forth by Claude-Henri Watelet[3] and by ideas of the philosophes, their "radical notions coopted into innocent forms of pleasure and ingenious decoration" as William Adams has pointed out.[4]

"An uninteresting architectural monument, perhaps, and fancifully restored... a forerunner of nineteenth-century exposition pavilions and the modern theme park., Betsy Rosasco remarked:[5] "during the Revolution, a misogynistic, nationalistic and class-driven polemic swirled around the hameau, which had previously seemed a harmless agglomeration of playhouses in which to act out a Boucher pastorale." The queen was accused by many of being frivolous, and found herself a target of innuendos, jealousy and gossip throughout her reign. For Marie Antoinette, the hameau was an escape from the regulated life style of the Court at Versailles, into a more simple way of life, while, to the eyes' of French people, a queen who amused herself at being a peasant did not improve her image. She reigned supreme in this small area, and even the King went there only at her invitation.

[edit] References

  1. ^ Its garden setting is discussed in Pierre-André Lablaude, The Gardens of Versailles (1995), a study that was prompted by the replanting undertaken after the disastrous storm of 3 February 1990 toppled 1300 trees at Versailles.
  2. ^ William Howard Adams, The French Garden 1500-1800 (New York: Braziller) 1979, p.122
  3. ^ Watelet's Essai sur les Jardins also appeared in 1774. Watelet was a rich amateur who had studied briefly with Hubert Robert, whose name is invariably invoked with the hameau, with the landscape setting of the Méréville and other early garden essays in the genre pittoresque.
  4. ^ Adams 1979:121.
  5. ^ Rosasco, in review of Lablaude 1995, in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 55.4 (December 1996, pp. 475-476) p 476.

[edit] External links

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Coordinates: 48°49′07″N 2°06′46″E / 48.818747°N 2.112916°E / 48.818747; 2.112916

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