Boston Flora

Tag: Gabriel Wick

  • Tuesday, October 1, 5:00 am – 6:30 am Eastern (but recorded) – A History of Gardens 2 – The French Baroque Garden, Online

    What is a garden? Why were they created as they were? What influences were at play in garden making, and how have gardens evolved and developed over time? These are the questions we will explore as we traverse the history of gardens through the ages.

    Following on from our opening talks on early gardens, this second series will examine how gardens developed during the 17th century. We will explore how exotic plants from around the world started to appear in European gardens, and were captured in botanical art, before the tumultuous impact of the English civil wars on gardens and gardening from the 1640s. The second part of the century saw the rise of extravagant, dramatic styles, now known as baroque gardens and exemplified by the work of André Le Nôtre for the Sun King at Versailles. We will explore these gardens through an analysis of the work of Le Nôtre and his contemporaries in France, and the series will end with a talk scrutinizing how the European baroque style played out in England.

    This ticket – purchase through Eventbrite HERE – is for this individual talk and costs £8, and you may purchase tickets for other individual sessions via the links below, or you may purchase a ticket for the entire [second] series of 5 talks in our History of Gardens Course at £35 via the link here. (Gardens Trust members £6 each or all 5 for £26.25) Ticket holders can join each session live and/or view a recording for up to 2 weeks afterwards.

    Visiting André Le Nôtre’s masterpieces, Chantilly, Vaux, Saint-Cloud, Sceaux, Versailles, the Grand Trianon, we encounter a series of static images, born out of the head of a ‘humble’ polymath for the greater glory of a megalomaniacal master. The myth of the sudden invention of the Louis XIV Grand Manner was carefully cultivated even at the time, but the roots of the Le Nôtrean taste stretched back to previous reigns, and designers. But what was the purpose of these linear perspectives and expanses of gravel? Of what were they made? How were they built and maintained?

    This talk examines the construction and formal vocabulary of these compositions, but also their antecedents in garden and military architecture, and their usages and significance in the social and political practices of the court. The last part of the talk considers the afterlife of the idiom, its evolution under Louis XV and Louis XVI, its neglect and destruction in the 19th century, and its rehabilitation in the Belle Époque.

    Dr Gabriel Wick is a landscape historian and curator. He teaches history of architecture and urbanism at the Paris campus of New York University and also lectures for the École du Louvre. He received his master’s in landscape architecture from UC Berkeley, a master’s of historic landscape conservation from ÉNSA-Versailles, and a doctorate in history from Queen Mary – University of London. His most recent book Gardens in Revolution: landscapes and political culture in France, 1760–1792 will be published in autumn 2024.

  • Monday, April 11, 2:00 pm – 3:30 pm – The Marquis de Laborde’s Mereville & the Princesse de Monaco’s Betz, Online

    The Jardin Anglais movement culminated in two vast and extravagant landscape gardens created on the eve of the Revolution, the Marquis de Laborde’s Méréville and the Princesse de Monaco’s Betz. Created on vast sites with essentially unlimited budgets, both landscapes offered a succession of arcadian, and lyrical scenes punctuated by unsettling confrontations with the force of ‘untamed nature’ and melancholic ruins. Laborde and Monaco would bring together France’s foremost artistic talents – Hubert Robert, Pajou, Belanger and Brongniart – to create these total immersive artworks. While Betz is currently inaccessible, a forthcoming exhibition at Chantilly will explore the story of its owner and her remarkable creation. Méréville, after long years of ruin and neglect, which endowed the garden with its own poetry, is currently the subject of one of the most ambitious and costly garden restoration projects on the continent. In this final Gardens Trust lecture on April 11 at 2 pm, Gabriel Wick will speak on this garden, part of the Jardin Anglais movement. £5 Attendees will be sent a Zoom link 2 days prior and a link to the recorded session will be sent shortly after and will be available for 1 week.

    Gabriel Wick is a lecturer at the Paris campus of New York University, and an independent researcher and curator. He has authored a number of monographs and articles on 18th-century French landscape gardens, including La Roche-Guyon, the domain of the Noailles, Monceau, Méréville, Betz and Rambouillet. He is currently curating a permanent exhibition at Rambouillet on its Jardin Anglais and advising the Fondation Chambrun on the restoration of Lafayette’s Lagrange. He received his doctorate in history from the University of London (QMUL) and holds a master’s in landscape architecture from UC Berkeley and historic landscape conservation from the École Nationale Superieure d’Architecture – Versailles.

    Image: © Hubert Robert, Composition of ruins for the Princesse de Monaco, Musée Conde.

  • Thursday, February 17, 1:00 pm – 2:00 pm – The Gardens of the Château de Méréville and Other Early Jardins à l’Anglaise of the Pre-Revolutionary Period, Online

    The “English” style garden arrived in France shortly after the end of the Seven Years War (1756-1763). The so-called “jardins anglais” or “jardins à l’anglaise” emulated the natural character of English landscape gardens such as Stowe or Blenheim, but on a much reduced scale and with a greater degree of eclecticism and whimsy. A dramatic break with the French Classical tradition, such “irregular” style gardens often combined a naturalistic topography with exotic structures, romantic ruins or antique temples and monuments. They embodied an ideal of nature artistically “improved”. Early examples of jardins à l’anglaise in France include Ermenonville, the Parc Monceau then on the outskirts of Paris, the Château de Bagatelle in the Bois de Boulogne, and the Hameau de la Reine (the Queen’s Hamlet) at the Petit Trianon in Versailles, but the two most extensive landscape gardens, complete with follies and picturesque features – parcs à fabriques – were the Désert de Retz near Versailles and the Château de Méréville in the Essonne department south of Paris. The Château de Méréville was built by the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde between 1784 and 1794. The park’s Romantic – sometimes called Anglo-Chinese – style soon replaced the more formal and symmetrical Classical gardens of the 17th century as the principal gardening style both in France and throughout Europe. 

    Speaker Gabriel Wick, who gave last week’s talk about the Gardens of Versailles, is a Paris-based landscape historian, writer and curator. He is an adjunct lecturer in architectural and urban history at the Paris campus of New York University. He received his doctorate in history from the University of London (QMUL) in 2017, and holds masters degrees in landscape architecture from UC Berkeley and historic landscape conservation from the National Architecture School of Versailles (ÉNSA – Versailles). He is the author of a number of books and scholarly articles on 18th French landscapes, including Le Domaine de Méréville – Renaissance d’un Jardin (Éditions des Falaises, 2018). He is currently consulting with the Foundation Chambrun on the conservation management plan of the Marquis de Lafayette’s domain of La Grange-Bléneau.   

    This program is presented by Alliance Française Miami Metro in partnership with the Alliance Française Chicago with communication support from the Federation of Alliances Françaises USA, the French Heritage Society, the Garden Conservancy, the Historic Gardens Foundation, and WICE. $10 for members of a sponsoring organization, $20 for nonmembers. Register HERE. Garden Conservancy members use code MERCIAFMM. The program is presented in English.