Boyceau, Jacques de la Barauderie

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Boyceau, Jacques de la Barauderie (c.1562–c.1634). French garden-designer and theorist. As Superintendent of the Gardens of the King under Louis XIII (reigned 1610–43) he exerted considerable influence on French taste. His Traité du jardinage (1638) not only summarized the history of French gardening, but established garden-design as something to be taken very seriously, complete with its own theory: in particular, it suggested a mode of training for the budding garden-designer to include architecture, art, draughtsmanship, geometry, horticulture, and hydraulics. It did not avoid a discussion of the siting of statues, eye-catch-ers, fountains, and so on. He was probably responsible for the design of the gardens of the Luxembourg Gardens, Paris (c.1611–29— with Mollet), which seems to have contained the first parterre de broderie. In collaboration with his nephew, Jacques de Menours (1591–1637), he laid out the gardens of the first Versailles (c.1631–6), and probably contributed to the creation of the parterre designs at Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the Louvre, and the Tuileries (the last two in Paris).

Bibliography

Hazlehurst (1966);
Racine (ed.) (2001)