Proof! by Amir Alexander

Author:Amir Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

THE MAN WHO KNEW HIS PLACE

To say that André Le Nôtre was born to be a gardener is not metaphorical praise of his genius but a statement of fact. André’s grandfather was Pierre Le Nôtre, master gardener to Catherine de Medici, and his father was Jean Le Nôtre, who bore the title of First Gardener to the King. As befits a clan of royal gardeners, the family lived and worked in the Tuileries, and that was where the future designer of Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles was born in 1613. Scion to a gardening dynasty, born on the grounds of the premier royal garden in France: there was never any doubt what vocation young André was expected to pursue. Some youths might perhaps rebel against their preordained destiny, but that was not Le Nôtre’s way. He accepted his vocation as his allotted place in life and followed meticulously the path laid before him. “Never did he overstep his position” was the high praise accorded to Le Nôtre many years later by the courtier and diarist the Duke of Saint-Simon (1675–1755), who knew Le Nôtre toward the end of the latter’s life. And that indeed is an apt description of the man: For Le Nôtre, even from his earliest days, was a man who knew his place.44

It worked well for him. Growing up he undoubtedly learned the family trade from his elders, so that as a young man he already knew how to plant and maintain the great rectangular parterres that were the building blocks of the great French royal gardens. Practical training, however, was not enough: it was in those very years that Jacques Boyceau was elevating the art of gardening from a form of manual labor into a theoretical discipline worthy of a gentleman like himself. Echoing Alberti, who insisted that an architect could not do without “Painting and Mathematicks,” Boyceau in his Traité du Jardinage explained that a true gardener must be a student of painting, architecture, and geometry. As Louis XIII’s “Intendant des jardins” Boyceau was the immediate superior of Jean Le Nôtre, who wisely took the advice to heart. He accordingly dispatched young André to expand his education in the studio of the royal painter Simon Vouet (1590–1649), where he studied draftsmanship, the principles of geometry, and the theory of linear perspective. As Boyceau had foreseen, these skills would prove indispensable for Le Nôtre as a high-level gardener in the royal service.

For that is indeed what Le Nôtre was soon to become: in 1635, at the age of twenty-two, he was already chief gardener to the king’s brother, Gaston d’Orleans, with special responsibilities in the Luxembourg gardens. By 1643 he was appointed dessinateur de parterres de tous les jardins du roi, and in 1649 he inherited his father’s former position as premier jardinier du roi at the Tuileries. Finally in 1657 he became contrôleur général des bâtiments du roi, a position that gave him responsibility for the design and maintenance of all royal residences. For a man born to be a gardener, it was a meteoric rise.

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