Beauregard Castle
The Château de Beauregard is in Beuvrontal in the field of French community Cellettes about six kilometers southeast of Blois in the department of Loir-et-Cher region Center-Val de Loire .
The property, one of the castles of the Loire , was built as a country castle in the 16th century, but was heavily modified by its later owners. Most of the buildings were demolished, especially during the 19th century. Surrounded by a large park that was designed between 1912 and 1925, the palace can now be visited for a fee after extensive restoration work, even though it is privately owned.
The castle building has been a listed building since 1840 . His park was added to the French list of monuments in September 1993.
Building description
The outer
The facility consists of a main building and a farmyard to the north of it. It is surrounded by a 70 hectare landscaped park , which also includes the ruins of a small chapel from the 12th century. This belonged to the predecessor of today's castle.
Coming from the N765, a 1400 meter long road leads axially through the Russy forest towards the two-storey main building made of light-colored natural stone. Its central wing has an open gallery with seven arcades on the ground floor . Above this is another gallery on the first floor, which is closed to the outside and has pilasters as decorative elements. A rectangular pavilion delimits the northern end of the central wing, while a short side wing adjoins its southern end. The floors of the central wing are vertically structured by a Doric - Ionic series of pilasters and - like the side wings - are decorated with medallions that were attached there in the 19th century. The dormer windows of the central building also date from the 19th century and , due to their size, create an inconsistent silhouette of the roof.
inside rooms
To Paul Ardier , advisor and treasurer of the French kings Henry III. , Heinrich IV. And Ludwig XIII. , the most remarkable room in today's building goes back, the Galerie des Illustres . It shows 327 portraits of important personalities from the history of France in the time from Philippe de Valois to Louis VIII. After Paul Adier, his son and finally his granddaughter Marie had other famous people portrayed until the gallery was finally as large as it is today. On its beamed ceiling and the base there are emblems and currency of various kings of France, which were made by Jean Mosnier. Another treasure of the 26 by 6 meter room is the floor from around 1646, which is completely covered with Delft tiles. Certain scenes from the pictures are repeated in the paintings that are embedded in the paneling of the gallery. On them you can see what the aristocracy was busy with at that time: weapons, hunting, games, sculpture, goldsmithing, reading, war and painting. In the paneling of the fireplace is a copy made in 1925 of Diana , the goddess of the hunt, painted by François Clouet . The original is now in the Louvre .
At the time when the humanist and an esthete Jean du Thier was the owner of the castle, which reminds Cabinet of Grelots ( German Schell Cabinet ). This cabinet was his study, which got its name from the coat of arms of the du Thier family. The motif of three bells on a blue background can be found both in the paneling and in the coffered ceiling . This room is best known for the carved and gilded oak paneling from 1554. It is the work of the royal cabinet maker Francisco Scibec de Carpi, who also used the paneling for Francis I in Fontainebleau Palace and the ceiling paneling of Henry II's magnificent room in the Louvre created.
The castle kitchen, which was used until 1968, is also worth seeing. One of the two large fireplaces in this room has a rotisserie spit for large roasts that is still functional.
history
The historiography first mentions Beauregard in 1495, when the property was owned by Charles VIII's personal chamberlain , Jean Doulcet, and by Louis d'Orléans - the later French King Louis XII. - was raised to the rank of seigneurism. At the beginning of the 16th century, Francis I acquired the land to organize hunts there, but gave it away to his uncle René of Savoy in 1524 .
Jean du Thier, State Secretary of King Henry II , bought it from his widow in 1545 for 2000 Goldécus . In the period from 1545 to 1553, he had a castle built in the country, presumably according to plans by Philibert de l'Ormes, in the style of the late French Renaissance , which, however, shows clear characteristics of the classicist Baroque style . Jacques I. Androuet du Cerceau included Beauregard Castle in the second volume of his work Les plus excellents bastiments de France , so it is still known today what it looked like in the 1570s.
Accordingly, the building was laid out as an estate. Its main building, together with some walls, enclosed a rectangular courtyard bordered by other courtyards of different sizes; including a spacious farm yard with a dovecote. Ornamental gardens, orchards and vineyards were located on the south and west sides of the castle. A chapel also belonged to the complex, which was decorated with frescoes by Nicolò dell'Abbate based on drawings by Francesco Primaticcio . It was located on the first floor of the entrance pavilion, which was demolished in the 19th century, so that today only a fresco fragment of the chapel remains in the Musée lapidaire in Blois Castle .
After Louis XII's finance secretary, Florimont II. De Robertet, acquired the facility in 1577, he sold it to Paul Ardier in 1617. This was mainly dedicated to the expansion of the interior of the palace, but previously (1622) had the central wing of the main building widened to double the depth, so that the building received its current, smoothly closing east facade on the park side. Under his son, the domain was raised to Vicomté by Louis XIV in 1654 .
The castle changed hands several times through inheritance and marriage, before it came to Claude Antoine Hippolyte de Preval , major general under Louis XIII, in 1816 . Preval had large beet beds laid out and ran a sugar factory in the castle's farm buildings. But because he could not record any economic success, he was forced to sell the property to Adelaïde Joséphine de Bourlon de Chanvage, Comtesse de Sainte-Aldegonde. In 1839 the countess hosted the pompous wedding of her daughter Marie Valentine Joséphine with Alexandre Edmond de Talleyrand-Périgord, son of Edmonds de Talleyrand-Périgord , in the castle .
In 1850 Jules de Cholet bought the castle. His heirs sold it in 1912 to the landscape architect Louis Tillier, who not only had the first restoration work carried out on the building, but also fundamentally redesigned the park, giving it its current appearance. In 1925 the property came into the possession of the de Gosselin family. Their descendants, the Counts of Cheyron du Pavillon, are still the owners of the complex today and have been gradually restoring it and its interior fittings since 1968.
literature
- Josef Müller-Marein, Herbert Kreft, Helmut Domke: Jardin de la France. Castles on the Loire. CW Niemeyer, Hameln 1967, pp. 170-171.
- Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Robert Polidori : Castles in the Loire Valley . Könemann, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-89508-597-9 , p. 86-87 .
- Françoise Vibert-Guigue: Center, châteaux de la Loire. Hachette, Paris 1991, ISBN 2-01-015564-5 , pp. 641-642.
Web links
- Castle website (French)
- Photos from Base Mémoire
Individual evidence
- ↑ Beauregard Castle in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French), accessed on January 6, 2020.
- ^ Françoise Vibert-Guigue: Center, châteaux de la Loire. 1991, p. 642.
- ↑ beauregard-loire.com , accessed January 6, 2020.
- ↑ pascale.olivaux.free.fr ( Memento from June 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Georges Poisson : Castles of the Loire. Goldmann, Munich 1964, p. 35.
- ↑ Eckhard Philipp: The Loire Valley. 3. Edition. Goldstadt, Pforzheim 1993, ISBN 3-87269-078-7 , p. 99.
- ↑ Vanessa Yager (Ed.): Ouverts au public. Monuments historiques: chateaux et abbayes, parcs et jardins, sites industriels et archéologiques édifices du XXe siècle. Le guide du patrimoine en France . Monum, Ed. du patrimoine, Paris 2002, ISBN 2-85822-760-8 , p. 227.
Coordinates: 47 ° 32 ′ 13 ″ N , 1 ° 23 ′ 1 ″ E