Two Animated Views Of The Jardin De Bagatelle In Gouache From The 18th Century By Louis Belanger

Louis Bélanger (1756-1816)
Two animated views of the Garden of Bagatelle
- The Great Rock and the cenotaph
- The Hermitage and the Obelisk Pair of gouaches
50 x 60 cm
End of the 18th century

Louis Bélanger shares with us with these two gouaches a precious testimony to the spirit of Bagatelle. Louis is the younger brother of François-Joseph Bélanger who was commissioned by the Count of Artois to build a pleasure pavilion and design the park with Thomas Blaikie in an Anglo-Chinese style, with many small factories, grottoes and waterfalls, very fashionable at the time. Bagatelle was born from a challenge launched in 1777 by Marie-Antoinette to her brother-in-law, the Count of Artois: to erect a small pleasure castle, a Folly, in three months. On this site already existed a building dating from the beginning of the 18th century which was the place of debauchery of the Maréchale d'Estrées, of Mademoiselle de Charolais then of Madame de Monconseil, hence its name of Bagatelle. The Count of Artois won his bet by erecting his Folie in sixty-seven days thanks to his first architect, the brother of the author of these two watercolors. During the Second Restoration, the Count of Artois gave Bagatelle to his son the Duke of Berry then, upon the latter's death to the Duke of Bordeaux, future Count of Chambord. The estate was then abandoned by Louis-Philippe and sold to an Englishman, the Marquis of Hertford. Richard Wallace then inherited it in 1871. In 1905, the city of Paris bought the estate, a large part of the furniture and works of art had already been dispersed. A number of sculptures and pieces of furniture are now preserved in the greatest museums in the world, including the MET in New York. Louis Bélanger trained with Pierre-Antoine Demachy (1723-1807), Francesco Casanova (1727-1803) and Louis-Gabriel Moreau, known as Moreau l'Aîné (1740-1806), who had a great influence on his style. Before moving to Stockholm, where he would end his life as Painter to the Court of Sweden, Louis Bélanger went into exile in London at the beginning of the Revolution, where his views of parks and gardens were appreciated and sought after by an aristocratic clientele. To meet the wishes of his patrons, Louis Bélanger did not hesitate to insert whims in order to embellish reality. Our gouaches were probably created at this time. A privileged witness to the construction of Bagatelle, these unpublished but typical views of the work of Louis Bélanger enrich our knowledge of the Bagatelle garden and confirm the locations of elements that have now disappeared. We easily recognize the landscape and the ornaments of the estate, which can be found in particular in prints by Claude Fessard, Chéreau and Laurent Guyot, such as the Obelisk, the Hermitage, the cenotaph on the Île des Tombeaux and the Grand-Rocher to its left in the foreground.