Le Desert De Retz – A Late Eigteenth–Century French Folly Garden The Artful Landscape of Monsieur De Monville (Paper)

Description

pp. 135, ” The 100 illustrations consist of views of the construction of the park (1774-1789); models from antiquity and analogues in contemporary gardens; facsimiles of the 26 engravings of the garden that appeared in Georges Le Rouge’s Détails de nouveaux jardins a la mode: Jardins anglo-chinois, the most important illustrated book on gardens of the eighteenth century; and photographs of the buildings and grounds taken by the British photographer Michael Kenna. These beautiful photographs, together with Diana Ketcham’s carefully researched text, capture the haunting atmosphere of the place during its transition from the romantic, overgrown state of benign neglect, which so intrigued the Surrealists, to the clearing and building that today preserve a balance between the encroachments of unruly vegetation and disintegration. “