Gardens in Hauts-de-Seine - Chteau de Malmaison, Chteau de Sceaux, Parc de Saint-Cloud, Arboretum de La Valle-Aux-Loups (Paperback)

Chapters: Chteau de Malmaison, Chteau de Sceaux, Parc de Saint-Cloud, Arboretum de La Valle-Aux-Loups. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 20. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: The Chteau de Sceaux is a grand country house in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, not far from Paris, France. Located in a park laid out by Andr Le Ntre, it houses the Muse de lle-de-France, a museum of local history. The former chteau was built for Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's minister of finance, who purchased the domaine in 1670. The present chteau, designed to evoke the style of Louis XIII, dates from the Second Empire. Some of Colbert's outbuildings remain, and the bones of the garden layout. The seigneurie of Sceaux appears in 15th century documents, but little remains above ground of the chteau built for the family Potier de Gesvres in 1597. Colbert turned to some of the premier royal architects and craftsmen to design a seat worthy of his station, the architect brothers Claude and Charles Perrault and Antoine Lepautre, and the premier peintre du roi Charles Le Brun. The parterres at Sceaux, engraved by Adam PerelleJean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay, son of Colbert and minister of the Navy, inherited Sceaux in 1683. He added sculpture by Franois Girardon and Antoine Coysevox. His embellishments to the grounds extended the formal terraced layout, the bones of which remain, and excavated the Grand Canal, a kilometre in length, along the valley bottom. Le Ntre laid out a main axis centered on the chteau and descending in a series of terraces to the valley bottom, then rising on the far side. The main axis is crossed by two grand secondary axes at right angles, one delineated by the alle de la Duchesse and the formal stone Cascade that flows down to fill an octagonal basin, the other the...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=4552378