The Château de Sceaux is a grand country house in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine

Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine

Sceaux is a commune in the southern suburbs of Paris, France. It is located from the center of Paris.-Wealth:Sceaux is famous for the Château of Sceaux, set in its large park , designed by André Le Nôtre, measuring...

, not far from Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

, France. Located in a park laid out by André Le Nôtre

André Le Nôtre

André Le Nôtre was a French landscape architect and the principal gardener of King Louis XIV of France...

, it houses the Musée de l’Île-de-France, a museum of local history. The former château was built for Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Jean-Baptiste Colbert

Jean-Baptiste Colbert was a French politician who served as the Minister of Finances of France from 1665 to 1683 under the rule of King Louis XIV. His relentless hard work and thrift made him an esteemed minister. He achieved a reputation for his work of improving the state of French manufacturing...

, Louis XIV

Louis XIV of France

Louis XIV , known as Louis the Great or the Sun King , was a Bourbon monarch who ruled as King of France and Navarre. His reign, from 1643 to his death in 1715, began at the age of four and lasted seventy-two years, three months, and eighteen days...

's minister of finance, who purchased the domaine in 1670. The present château, 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.

History

The seigneurie of Sceaux appears in 15th century documents, but little remains above ground of the château 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

Claude Perrault

Claude Perrault is best known as the architect of the eastern range of the Louvre Palace in Paris , but he also achieved success as a physician and anatomist, and as an author, who wrote treatises on physics and natural history.Perrault was born and died in Paris...

 and Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault

Charles Perrault was a French author who laid the foundations for a new literary genre, the fairy tale, with his works derived from pre-existing folk tales. The best known include Le Petit Chaperon rouge , Cendrillon , Le Chat Botté and La Barbe bleue...

 and Antoine Lepautre

Antoine Lepautre

Antoine Lepautre or Le Pautre was a French architect and engraver. Born in Paris, he was the brother of the prolific and inventive designer-engraver Jean Lepautre. Antoine Lepautre has been called " "one of the most inventive architects of the early years of Louis XIV's reign"...

, and the premier peintre du roi Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun

Charles Le Brun , a French painter and art theorist, became the all-powerful, peerless master of 17th-century French art.-Biography:-Early life and training:...

.

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay

Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay

Jean-Baptiste Antoine Colbert, Marquis de Seignelay was a French politician. He was the eldest son of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, nephew of Charles Colbert de Croissy and cousin of Jean-Baptiste Colbert de Torcy....

, son of Colbert and minister of the Navy, inherited Sceaux in 1683. He added sculpture by François Girardon

François Girardon

François Girardon was a French sculptor.He was born at Troyes. As a boy he had for master a joiner and wood-carver of his native town, named Baudesson, under whom he is said to have worked at the chateau of Liebault, where he attracted the notice of Chancellor Séguier...

 and Antoine Coysevox

Antoine Coysevox

Charles Antoine Coysevox , French sculptor, was born at Lyon, and belonged to a family which had emigrated from Spain...

. 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 Nôtre laid out a main axis centered on the château 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 allée de la Duchesse

Avenue (landscape)

__notoc__In landscaping, an avenue or allée is traditionally a straight route with a line of trees or large shrubs running along each, which is used, as its French source venir indicates, to emphasize the "coming to," or arrival at a landscape or architectural feature...

and the formal stone Cascade that flows down to fill an octagonal basin, the other the Grand Canal.

Jules Hardouin-Mansart built the Orangerie

Orangery

An orangery was a building in the grounds of fashionable residences from the 17th to the 19th centuries and given a classicising architectural form. The orangery was similar to a greenhouse or conservatory...

, which was inaugurated by the King at a fête in 1685. Sceaux was sold in 1699 to Louis' illegitimate son, the duc du Maine, whose wife, Anne, duchesse du Maine

Anne, Duchess of Maine

Louise Bénédicte de Bourbon , was the daughter of Henri Jules de Bourbon, prince de Condé and Anne Henriette of Bavaria. As a member of the reigning House of Bourbon, she was a princesse du sang. She was known as Louise-Bénédicte. She has no surviving descendants...

 made it the setting for her glittering salon

Salon (gathering)

A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine taste and increase their knowledge of the participants through conversation. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to...

 in the first decades of the eighteenth century, which reached its apogee in the Grandes Nuits of 1714-15, sixteen fêtes of music and opera-ballets that unfolded every two weeks and drew the best musicians of France, under the direction of Jean-Joseph Mouret

Jean-Joseph Mouret

Jean-Joseph Mouret was a French composer whose dramatic works made him one of the leading exponents of Baroque music in his country...

. The salon at Sceaux attracted the young Voltaire

Voltaire

François-Marie Arouet , better known by the pen name Voltaire , was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, free trade and separation of church and state...

. The duchesse du Maine had the pavilion

Pavilion (structure)

In architecture a pavilion has two main meanings.-Free-standing structure:Pavilion may refer to a free-standing structure sited a short distance from a main residence, whose architecture makes it an object of pleasure. Large or small, there is usually a connection with relaxation and pleasure in...

 of the Ménagerie built, to designs by Jacques de La Guépière

Philippe de La Guêpière

Philippe de La Guêpière was a French architect whose main commissions were from Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg.-Early life :...

, and gave it a garden setting, to the north of the château; only its foundations remain.

Demolition

During the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

 the property was confiscated as a bien national, its contents sold for the benefit of the nation, and the building bought by M. Lecomte, a merchant of Saint-Malo

Saint-Malo

Saint-Malo is a walled port city in Brittany in northwestern France on the English Channel. It is a sub-prefecture of the Ille-et-Vilaine.-Demographics:The population can increase to up to 200,000 in the summer tourist season...

. Under the Consulat, the original château was demolished, but the pavilion of Aurore, the Orangerie, the stables, and outbuildings were preserved. Crops were grown on Le Nôtre's terraces.

The restored castle

The duc de Trévise, son of Napoleon's Maréchal Mortier

Édouard Adolphe Casimir Joseph Mortier

Édouard Adolphe Casimir Joseph Mortier, 1st Duc de Trévise was a French general and Marshal of France under Napoleon I.-Biography:...

, who had married the daughter of M. Lecomte, inherited the domaine and set to restoring the park and the pavilion and Orangerie. The gardens were restored, with parterres and gravel largely replaced by clipped lawns. In 1856-62 he erected the present smaller château in brick with stone quoins, designed to evoke the style of Louis XIII, designed by the architect Augustin Théophile Quantinet and built by Joseph-Michel Le Soufaché.

In 1922, the heiress of Trévise, princesse de Faucigny-Cystra, planned to give up Sceaux to real estate developers; through the efforts of the mayor Jean-Baptiste Bergeret de Frouville it was preserved and opened to the public of the town that had grown up around the park.

Museum of Ile de France

Today the château contains the Musée de l’Île-de-France. This museum contains one of the largest collections of the painters of the School of Paris

School of Paris

School of Paris refers to two distinct groups of artists — a group of medieval manuscript illuminators, and a group of non-French artists working in Paris before World War I...

, among which arew four paintings of Maurice Boitel

Maurice Boitel

Maurice Boitel Maurice Boitel Maurice Boitel (July 31, 1919 – August 11, 2007 in Audresselles (Pas-de-Calais), was a French painter.-Artistic life:Maurice Boitel belonged to the art movement called "La Jeune Peinture" ("Young Picture") of the School of Paris, with painters like Bernard Buffet, Yves...

.