Berthault, Louis-Martin

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Berthault, Louis-Martin (1770–1823). French architect and landscape-architect, a pupil of Percier. He decorated a house on the Rue du Mont-Blanc, Paris, and designed a celebrated garden at Raincy which included a Russian House, a grotto, and an iron bridge (all 1790s and early 1800s). His garden at Les Fontaines, near Chantilly (1792–1822), had Picturesque and Neo-Classical features (e.g. Fisherman's House, Boat-House, Sepulchre, and Obelisk on an island), and is known from the drawings by C. Bourgeois and Berthault's uncle, Pierre-Gabriel Berthault, published in Suite de Vingt-Quatre Vues de Jardins Anglais (1812). Berthault transformed several French gardens into less formal arrangements, notably at Courson (from 1820). He became Chief Architect to the Empress Josephine (1763–1814) in 1805, for whom he carried out works at the garden of La Malmaison. Other parks on which he worked were those at St-Leu-Taverny, Beauregard (near Villeneuve-St-George), and Compiègne. His eclectic use of a wide variety of exotic shrubs and trees created a rich, sometimes overwhelming effect.

Bibliography

Arneville (1981);
M&T (1991);
Racine (ed.) (2001)

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Berthault, Louis-Martin

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