Jardins romantiques français (1770-1840) — Du jardin des Lumières au parc romantique

Exhibition

Drawing, painting, screen-printing

Jardins romantiques français (1770-1840)
Du jardin des Lumières au parc romantique

Past: March 8 → July 17, 2011

The Musée de la Vie romantique is opening a major exhibition comprising over 100 paintings, watercolours, drawings and decorative art pieces, focusing on the most important gardens in France between 1770 and 1840.

A new « sensitive » type of gardens influenced by the English, started in France during the mid 18th c. The first to be designed in the rustic style were by followers of the famous Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau who prompted to a new relationship between Man and Nature. Estates and gardens were scattered with grottos, temples and monuments in a pre-romantic scenery. Méréville and Ermenonville near Paris were the answer for Stowe (Buckingham), Europe most influential landscape gardens. Horace Walpole was in Paris in 1771 and reported exultantly « this new Anglomania will literally be mad English ».

After the Revolution, French aristocrats, who had emigrated to Britain and discovered modern English agriculture, started, on their return to their homeland, to restore their parks in the Brownian style — after Capability Brown, England greatest gardener (1716-1783). Under Napoleon, Empress Josephine who was a keen collector of exotic plants she received from Africa and Australia, commissioned at La Malmaison a modern park open to nature and had her roses painted by Redouté. Two decades later, during the restoration of the French Royal Monarchy, Botany became more than ever a new way of life. Gardens enthused a rising Bourgeois Café society.

Prominent lenders include Musée du Louvre, Archives nationales, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Museum d’Histoire naturelle, as well as La Malmaison, Carnavalet, Marmottan, Sceaux, Galliera, Chaalis, Ajaccio, Lille, Arenenberg (Suisse) and private collectors.

Musée de la Vie Romantique Museum
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Hôtel Scheffer-Renan
16, rue Chaptal

75009 Paris

T. 01 55 31 95 67

Liège
Pigalle
Saint-George

Opening hours

Every day except Monday, 10 AM – 6 PM
Closed on Mondays and bank holidays.

Admission fee

Full rate €6.00 — Concessions €4.00

14-26 ans : 3,5 euros. Accès gratuit dans les collections permanentes.

The artists

  • Pierre-Joseph Redouté
  • Gabriel Thouin
  • Antoine Chazal
  • Antoine Duclaux
  • Louis Léopold Boilly