Parc de Sceaux
The Parc de Sceaux is now a 181 hectare castle park south of Paris in the municipal areas of Sceaux and Antony in the Hauts-de-Seine department . The park was designed by André Le Nôtre for Jean-Baptiste Colbert and his eldest son. He was threatened with disappearing several times. During the French Revolution it was converted into an agricultural school. At the beginning of the 19th century, the castle originally central to the park (from the 15th century, expanded after 1670) was destroyed.
history
There is evidence of a manor house in Sceaux since the 15th century . In 1670 Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Minister of Louis XIV , was looking for a property near Paris and not too far from Versailles . He bought the manor house, acquired additional land and expanded the castle , which dates from 1597, by an unknown architect, possibly Antoine Le Pautre . The palace chapel was painted by Charles Lebrun . Artists such as François Girardon , Jean-Baptiste Tuby and Jean-Baptiste Théodon were involved in the design. Colbert's study was decorated with 24 busts of Roman emperors, senators and noble women. The large north-south axis of the garden was over a kilometer in length. Contemporaries admired the great cascade.
After Colbert's death in 1683, his eldest son inherited the property and had the palace and garden expanded. The Marquis de Seignelay was in 1686 which today partly preserved Orangery by Jules Hardouin-Mansart build. The park was enlarged to 227 hectares. André Le Nôtre created a second major axis.
In 1700 the property was bought by the Duke of Maine , the legitimate son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan . The Duchess of Maine , granddaughter of the Great Condé held court there.
In 1793 the property was confiscated as a national property ( Bien national ), most of the statues ended up in Alexandre Lenoir's Musée des Monuments français . In 1798 the palace and garden were acquired by Jean François Hippolyte Lecomte, a wealthy wine merchant with good connections to Police Minister Joseph Fouché . Lecomte had the castle demolished in 1803.
1828 married Anne-Marie Lecomte-Stuart (1808-1870), daughter of the wine merchant Lecomte Napoléon Mortier de Trévise (1804-1869), the son of Édouard Adolphe Mortiers , a Marshal Napoleon Bonapartes . From 1856 to 1862 the couple had a small Neo- Louis XIII- style castle built in place of Colbert's building . The architect Joseph-Michel Le Soufaché provided the plans . Le Nôtre's garden concept was restored, and the palace and park were once again the venue for glamorous celebrations.
After the end of the First World War , the private owners could no longer maintain the facility. In 1923 the heiress, Marie Léonie Mortier de Trévise, married Princesse de Faucigny-Cystria, had to sell the park. Jean-Baptiste Bergeret de Frouville, the mayor of Sceaux, was able to win the Conseil général of the then Département Seine for the purchase. However, the administrative authority parceled to order the remaining third from 1928 the park restored . The Pavillon de l'Aurore with its ceiling painting by Charles Lebrun is one of the few remnants of the baroque palace complex.
The Pavillon de Hanovre was transferred to the park in 1932. The building by the architect Jean-Michel Chevotet, dating from 1758–1760, stood in the gardens of the Duke of Richelieu and had to give way to the Palais Berlitz of the language institute on the Boulevard des Italiens . The park has been owned by the Hauts-de-Seine department since 1971 and is used, among other things, for concerts. Supertramp , Madonna and Johnny Hallyday have already performed in large open-air concerts there.
West facade of the new castle (2009)
The new castle, west view
Pavilion de l'Aurore
Pavilion de Hanovre
literature
- Catherine Dupouey: Le Parc de Sceaux . JDG publications, 1996.
- Marianne de Meyenbourg, Gérard Rousset-Charny: Le Domaine de Sceaux . 2nd edition, Éditions du patrimoine, Collection Itinéraires du patrimoine, 2007, ISBN 978-2-85822-341-1 .
- Marianne de Meyenbourg: Trois siècles d'histoire . In: Dossier de l'Art , No. 169, December 2009. pp. 8–13.
- Inès Murat: Colbert . Librairie Arthème Fayard, Paris 1980, ISBN 2-501-00614-3 .
- Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos (ed.): Guide du Patrimoine. Île-de-France. Hachette, Paris 1992, ISBN 2-01-016811-9 , p.
- Georges Poisson : Sceaux, histoire et guide. Paris Edt de l'Indispensable, 1951.
