Essay on Gardens. Claude-Henri Watelet
space and time. Movement is the key to the garden theory of Watelet: “Movement, that very spirit of nature, that inexhaustible source of the interest she inspires.”
Watelet also engages topical aesthetic debates dealing with association theory and artistic mimesis or imitation in his discussion of the poetic and romantic garden genres. The poetic, which draws from “mythologies and . . . ancient or foreign practices and customs,” and the romantic, whose actions are “more vague, more personal,” require imagination and invention to set in motion an association of ideas to recall a certain time, place, climate, and story. As such, these genres draw most heavily from learning or individual experience. But they are also the genres most open to the abuse of artificial or foreign effects, such as fabriques (architectural follies) and other contrivances that suggest “tales of fiction and fairyland.” All these devices are implicated in the theory of association, which Watelet hints at but never fully develops. Nevertheless, Watelet, more in line with the Englishman Whately than his own countryman Carmontelle, reproves emblematic devices and warns of the “errors of taste” that distort the imagination.30
Related to association was the theory of artistic mimesis. At issue is the degree to which Art should lord over Nature in the creation of the garden. The argument was an area of fundamental contention among the garden theorists and was not confined to national boundaries. For some, like Chambers and Carmontelle, nature was too paltry and uninteresting on its own ever to be pleasing and effective at moving the soul; nature needed improving. Whately held the opposite view. Morel agreed with Whately on the need to temper artifice in the garden, but went even further: he removed landscape gardening from the imitative arts, something seconded by the French academician Antoine Quatremère de Quincy.31 Watelet took somewhat of a middle ground. He allowed for pastoral and rural imagery, but shunned artificiality and foreign influences, although he constructed a Chinese bridge at Moulin Joli. Such contradictions were standard fare and detract little from his essential point that “the nature of the terrain is of primary importance in determining the character of a garden scene,” and that the accompanying elements of nature alone were sufficient to create a spectrum of moods necessary to arouse the soul. Though he tacitly accepts that gardening is an art of manipulation, the key to a successful picturesque garden is to balance the equation between artifice and nature. His dictum is “[come] as close as possible to artifice, while abandoning nature as little as possible,” and the inevitable conclusion follows a few pages latter: “Any art that shows itself too clearly destroys the effect of Art.”
It is important to note that Watelet’s discussion of garden genres and aesthetic debates contains the overarching metaphysical argument of the Essay, and indeed of all picturesque garden theory: the affective powers of inanimate objects, whether natural or otherwise, to stir the senses and move the soul. Thus the discussion of landscape genres is about creating landscapes of different characters, which can elicit different emotional responses from terror to delight, pain to sensual pleasure. Recognizing the practical and sensible wants of man, Watelet’s conception of the picturesque garden appealed to both body and spirit, and in the process combined material satisfaction with spiritual enlightenment.32
With these precepts, Watelet is operating wholly within the realm of philosophical empiricism, which had a dramatic impact on all picturesque theory. No doubt, Watelet’s education and association with Enlightenment society colored, if not instigated, his explicit acceptance of the mechanisms of empirical sensationalism. In all probability, his direct source was the Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Locke’s disciple in France. Condillac’s Traité des sensations (Treatise on the Sensations, 1754), which preceded Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) by three years, and its French translation by a decade, was undoubtedly known to Watelet. Condillac’s influence is evident in Watelet’s early poem, L’Art de peindre, in which he explores the activation of the senses through art. Otherwise lost in a sentimental verse—“the artist must paint with his soul”—Watelet includes unmistakable sensationalist tropes. For example, in Song Four he recalls human passions of pleasure and pain, love and hate—the binary toggle switches Condillac uses to bring his famous statue to life:
What the senses, when aroused, contribute to the passions,
The soul returns to the senses by the way it expresses them.
Joy and sadness, pleasure and pain,
Excite every nerve, flow through every vein.
Desire and love, hatred and anger,
Each has its own traits, its look, its gestures, and its colors.33
Watelet introduces such sensationalist writing into his Essay almost from the start: “we wish not only that both the materials of artistic creations and their uses bring pleasure to the senses, but also that the mind and soul in turn be touched and stirred by their appeal.” Although he does not call attention to the empiricist heritage, it is safe to say that the society to which his Essay is addressed was well informed on the sources of his metaphysical inspiration. The importance of this heritage should not be underestimated or overlooked, as it greatly influenced subsequent picturesque garden theory and, perhaps more important, provided the theoretical means for designing gardens independent of previous practice. It is no exaggeration to say that with Watelet’s sensationalist based picturesque garden theory, gardening in France had entered a new era.
Watelet concludes his Essay on Gardens with a “letter to a friend.” It is a charming description of a garden he knows intimately—Moulin Joli. It is artfully rendered with a delicateness and refinement so befitting the era. He paints a gentle picture—more watercolor than oil—of a setting for a civil and hospitable society lived in rural bliss. Yet there is something disquieting, if not sad, in Watelet’s nostalgic description of his beloved island retreat. The site seems a passive landscape, one long neglected. Three river islands made of mud and earth, with no stone quays, no harsh or hard-edged embankments. The bridges are wood and wobbly, the footpaths earthen. The air is fresh and cool. Muted birdsong, gentle murmurs of a languid Seine, Boucher-toned milkmaids, wood nymphs, and a population of real and imaginary citizens inhabit this paradise. But the season is late. The river is low. The trees are old and full, the air at midday heavy. There is a spent quality to the landscape signaled by an eroding dike.
It is indeed ironic that at the time Watelet was putting the finishing touches to his garden essay he was facing bankruptcy. Worse, his health was failing. A little over a decade later he would be dead, and the Revolution would come and wipe out the society so dear to him. As for his Moulin Joli, what the Revolution did not destroy, time and commerce did. By the early nineteenth century, the island retreat was all but gone, its trees sold, its structures abandoned and in ruin, its contours washed away.
Oh, do not dismiss the worth of time,
For while the water rushes forth,
The wheel must meet its rapid beat.
So your days keep spinning on.
Enjoy, enjoy your allotted time.34
Essay on Gardens
Fortunatus et ille, deos qui novit agrestis.
(But happy, too, is he who knows the rural gods.)
Virgil, Georgics, book 2, line 493
Foreword
Society today shows greater interest than ever before in the intelligent enjoyment of the agreeable arts.1 This leads them to multiply and divide into an infinity of branches, and to show steady advancement. As a result, the “mechanical”2 aspect of these arts has progressed almost as much as it can, driven by wealth, imitation, and industry. We now seem to require, however, that the “liberal” side also contribute to the agreeable arts all the attention they deserve. In other words, we wish not only that both the materials of artistic creations and their uses bring pleasure to the senses, but also that the mind and the soul in turn be touched and stirred by their appeal. That is the natural progress followed by an alert mind when its desires are stimulated, and also by the soul which,