Gregory Brown (History, UNLV)
Speaker(s): Gregory Brown (History, UNLV)
"The genteel urban house in late 18th-century Paris: Hubert's caprices, Belanger's gardens, and the villa Beaumarchais"
This paper will consider the relationship among interior décor, landscape, and the visual representation of urban space using as a case study, the villa Beaumarchais constructed on the eastern edge of Paris in 1790. The villa has been little studied, either for its material culture and design elements or for its social and political meaning as a genteel country home, situated incongruously on an in-fill site in the heart of the rapidly growing, industrial Faubourg Saint-Antoine, just adjacent to the Bastille and the obsolete eastern rampart of Paris.
Almost all that is known of the urban villa (technically a folie) including the main building, designed by Paul Guillaume Le Moine; its Anglo-Chinese gardens designed by François-Joseph Bélanger; and the interior décor designed by prominent painter Hubert Robert, comes from a very few visual sources –engravings based upon architectural plans and color paintings of the house and gardens. Several of these images, including the best-known representation of the houses façade and its topographical emplacement in the gardens and surrounding quartier, while widely circulated as engravings in the early decades of the nineteenth century, appear to have been created originally before the completion of the gardens and the house in 1790 - 1791. Indeed, Le Moine, a prominent architect who had won the prize of Rome, and Bélanger, probably the most active architect in the domestic construction boom of the later decades of the 18th century, appear to have been active in publicizing their work as exemplary of the wave of Greek-revival neo-classical domestic architecture of late eighteenth-century Paris.
This paper will focus on one particular aspect of the design, execution and promotion of the estate – the decoration of the central salon. In 1789 – 1790, Beaumarchais – likely through Bélanger -- contracted Robert to execute a cycle of eight “caprice” paintings depicting antique statues set in imagined pastoral landscapes. These floor-to-ceiling panels, still in the possession of the City of Paris, were hung to alternate with floor-to-ceiling windows looking out onto the gardens, including one window which looked directly onto a replica of an antique Atlas statue depicted in a painting adjacent to the window.
I will argue that the intended visual effect of displacing the viewer from the immediately adjacent, bustling urban public spaces along the boulevard Saint-Antoine into an imagined pastoral landscape reveals a larger tension about the villa and the surrounding city – a collision between private interest of acquiring land and isolating oneself in a walled compound associated by contemporaries with luxury and ostentation and between a public project of reconstructing eastern Paris and opening up what had been a walled, medieval city streetscape into dynamic, thriving and publicly accessible thoroughfares. This collision, of course, would correspond closely to the political imagery of the Revolution, as a collision of self-interested aristocrats and publicly engaged citizens.
Gregory S. Brown is Professor of history and Vice Provost of Faculty, Policy, and Research at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His research focuses on Enlightenment France and issues of "self-fashioning," performance and printing, patronage, and censorship. He is the author of numerous articles on these subjects as well as A Field of Honor: Writers, Court Culture and Public Theater in French Literary Life from Racine to the Revolution (2002), Cultures in Conflict: The French Revolution (2003), and Literary Sociability and Literary Property in France, 1775-1793: Beaumarchais, Société des auteurs dramatiques and the Comédie Française (2006).