Jacques Boyceau

Jacques Boyceau, sieur de la Barauderie [According to the inscription on his portrait engraved by Gregoire Huret [http://search.famsf.org:8080/view.shtml?record=45958&=list&=1&=&=And] , not "Baraudière" as is sometimes reported.] (ca 1560–1633) was a French garden designer, the superintendent of royal gardens under Louis XIII, whose posthumously-produced "Traité du iardinage selon les raisons de la nature et de l'art. Ensemble divers desseins de parterres, pelouzes, bosquets et autres ornements" ["Treaty of gardening according to the principles of nature and of art. Together with divers designs of parterres, greens, "bosquets" and other ornaments"] was published in 1638. Its sixty engravings after Boyceau's designs make it one of the milestones in tracing the history of the French formal garden. His nephew Jacques de Menours, who produced the volume, included an engraved frontispiece with the portrait of Boyceau.

A few of the plates show formally planted "bosquets", but the majority are of designs for parterres. The accompanying text asserts that some of these designs have been used at royal residences: the Palais du Luxembourg, where the two axes at right angles survive from Boyceau's original plan, the Jardin des Tuileries, the newly-built château of Saint Germain-en-Laye, even at the simple château at Versailles.

Boyceau was made a "gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du roi" [A "gentleman-in-ordinary to the King's bedchamber"] and ennobled for his efforts, as the sieur de la Barauderie.

Boyceau's book is the first French work to treat the esthetic of gardening, not simply its practice. It was designed for the patron rather than for the gardener, but it had an influence on the designs of André Le Nôtre, who transformed the manner of Boyceau and of the Mollet dynasty of royal gardeners—Claude Mollet and André Mollet—to create the culminating French Baroque gardens, exemplified at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles.

His engraving reproducing the parterre design centered on the garden front of the Luxembourg employs the monogram of Marie de' Medici, part of a centrally-oriented design with a central pool with a single water jet in a sunken plat, surrounded by four sloped spandrel compartments and outer framing compartments, all filled with fine "rinceaux" that were executed in clipped boxwood and colored gravels and were set in wide gravel walks [The design, with its semi-circular exedra at the top, provided a model for a standard type of marquetry mirror frame that was produced in Amsterdam and London, c. 1660-1680 (Percy Macquoid, "Age of Walnut" 1906)] . The design, which expressed variety within a unified ensemble, was best appreciated fromn the windows of the "piano nobile". It was swept away shortly after 1693 in favour of the broader, simpler parterre of Claude Desgotz.

Notes

References

* [http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/gard_2/hod_26.104.2.htm Metropolitan Museum, Jacques Boyceau, parterre at the Palais du Luxembourg
* [http://www.lenotre.culture.gouv.fr/culture/celebrations/lenotre/fr/re/boyceau.htm Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie]
*F Hamilton Hazlehurst, 1966. "Jacques Boyceau and the French Formal Garden" (Athens, University of Georgia Press)