Essay on Gardens. Claude-Henri Watelet
a lively debate on the style of fabriques (architectural follies) in the picturesque garden.12 Such debate would become central in association theory. One need only compare Brown’s Blenheim to Chambers’s Kew, or Morel and Girardin’s Ermenonville to Carmontelle’s Monceau to realize how little uniformity there was to picturesque style. In their treatment of pure landscape features, Blenheim and Ermenonville try to mask indications of human intervention, and for the most part avoid exotic structures. On the other hand, Kew, and in particular Monceau, are filled with artful and exotic contrivances.
The unprecedented number of garden theory books published in this single decade only underscores the receptive climate to the new genre, the appreciation of which made it no longer a novelty, but a received notion of an informed public.13 In style, content, and manner of writing, these books were in new theoretical territory. Though tethered to a previous garden heritage, they assume an unmistakable, original, and wholly self-contained quality that sets them apart from previous garden literature. For the most part they contain no plans, offer no prescriptions, ignore geometry and proportions, and to all intents and purposes contain little practical information, such as plant lists, or technical guidance, such as surveying or drainage tips. Rather, these texts are heavily weighted with pure landscape description in a direct appeal to the imagination. Without exception they expand the scope of design practice beyond the utility of domestic convenience in a concerted effort to create landscapes that stir the emotions. While some previous authors, such as Dézallier d’Argenville, encouraged a look beyond the garden wall, these texts demonstratively engage a distant prospect rich in pleasure, utility, industry, and ruin.
Their common goal was to elevate landscape gardening to an independent branch of fine arts divorced from and, for some authors such as Whately, superior to landscape painting. Further, the writers of the new texts, who for the most part were not trained in the design disciplines, implicitly or explicitly recognized the distinction between architects—the traditional garden designers—and the designer of picturesque gardens, as yet unnamed. Without exception, the writers disavowed the architect’s place in the creation of the new genre. Henceforth architecture theory—as codified by Blondel, for example—would no longer be the arbiter of taste in garden design. Gone were geometry and symmetry, the formal imperatives of the regular garden. Moreover, abandoning the pure and abstract geometric vocabulary of eternal and immutable forms allowed for an existential measure of temporality.14 Doing so opened the way for the garden to be conceptualized as a human domain independent of God.15
Moulin Joli and the Essay on Gardens
Though the Essay made a tardy entry into the publishing history of the picturesque garden, Watelet had been practicing for decades the new garden art his book espoused. In 1750 he began to acquire three small islands in the Seine at Colombes, downstream from Paris, where he created a country retreat known as Moulin Joli—so called after an on-site working mill. The place became a de facto proving ground where the gentleman gardener could experiment with the new notions of the picturesque. Watelet probably began to improve the grounds immediately, although the construction history of Moulin Joli is not certain and its acquisition history has only recently been uncovered.16 Of interest, while Watelet bought the property and saw to its improvements, he was not the owner of record. Rather, his mistress and her husband held legal title, though their ownership was not common knowledge at the time. Presumably, Watelet’s real-estate largess speaks of his love for Mme Le Comte, but the circumstances, or benefits, of such an arrangement have yet to be sorted out. Nevertheless, Watelet spent a fortune—his own—creating his Elysium on the Seine.17
Moulin Joli is reputedly the first picturesque garden in France, though its plan seems strikingly devoid of “picturesqueness.” One might say that its claim to the genre is literal, as it was depicted in paintings, drawings, and engravings by artists such as François Boucher, Jean Le Prince, Jean-Claude de Saint-Non, and Hubert Robert. In virtually all images Moulin Joli suggests a rural landscape of deferred maintenance, if not calculated neglect. Nonetheless, the mixture of the water mill, row boats, fishermen, laundresses, with tender lovers, polite society, and Latin inscriptions carved into trees made Moulin Joli a corporeal landscape of the agréable (pleasurable) and the utile (useful), the pastoral ideal that pervades Watelet’s Essay. Whatever its true appearance—it has long since been destroyed—Moulin Joli was a destination for Parisian society. Its renown was no doubt enhanced with the publication of the Essay, which contained a chapter-long description of the property. Moulin Joli’s importance was given a royal imprimatur in the summer of 1774 with a visit by Louis XVI and his queen. Although Watelet’s station could warrant hosting the monarchs, their detour was less a social call than a reconnaissance study of the garden sensation Watelet had created. Soon afterwards, Marie-Antoine began her Hameau at Versailles.
If Moulin Joli was the product of Watelet’s theory avant la lettre, it was left for the Essay on Gardens to describe the thinking that occasioned it. The book was immediately recognized for its contribution to the new style of gardening, and with its publication France made a forthright entry into the debate. Watelet fashioned his theory by incorporating the intellectual and aesthetic debates of the time, and in the process set the theoretical standard of picturesque practice. All subsequent French books on the subject would use it as a basis, if not borrow from it directly. Although the Essay followed Whately’s Observations and Chambers’s Dissertation, and cannot and does not avoid the influence of these works, Watelet’s book signals an independent contribution to the French treatment of picturesque theory.18
To be sure, the climate was fertile for its reception, but perhaps what most contributed to its success was its modest ambition. As its title states, the work is an essay, better read in one sitting than studied at length. In style, it is intensely personal, and its frequent rambles suggest a transcription of a guided tour of Moulin Joli by Watelet himself. The work pleases most when appreciated for its grace, rather than gardening prescriptions. Overall, the Essay sets a soothing, civil tone that resonates remarkably well with the society to which it is addressed.
1. Moulin Joli, plan, ca. 1780. Archives Nationales, Paris.
The Essay was well received by the public—so much so that Watelet planned a second edition19—and by the press. Though Morel objected to the book’s poor organization and lack of technical expertise,20 and Grimm had problems with discordant neologisms, such as ostensive (“ostentatious”),21 Jean-François de La Harpe, among the most respected literary critics of the day, wrote quite favorably in the Mercure de France: “What is of interest in his style is that it seems to belong to one of gentle manners and agreeable character, and all those who will see the touching description of his country retreat will wish to live there with him.”22 And the weekly Affiches pointedly praised the Essay’s refreshing didactic style and serious tone, which did not harm its grace.23 Hirschfeld paid Watelet the complement of including large sections of the Essay in his Theorie der Gartenkunst, as well as freely adapting a good bit of its theory. And in a measure of how influential Watelet’s book would become—and by extension that of picturesque theory in general—Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières dedicated his book Le Génie de l’architecture; ou, l’Analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations, 1780) to Watelet. Le Camus praised Watelet’s sensitivity, vision, and delicate touch.24
To assess the Essay fully, we must recall that it was intended as part of a general study of taste that Watelet left incomplete at the time of his death. Thus, although it can be read as an autonomous work, the book does not present a fully formulated, coherent theory. Nevertheless, it sufficiently established the aims and methods of the French picturesque, and argued—politely, yet forcefully—for the inclusion of landscape gardening among the liberal arts. The point was not moot. Although gardening had always been appreciated, it held a somewhat stepchild status in the hierarchy of the fine arts. Thomas Whately took up the gauntlet in the opening sentence of his Observations: “Gardening, in the perfection to which it has