French garden designer
Andre Mollet
(died before 16 June 1665) was a French
garden designer
, the son of
Claude Mollet
?gardener to three French kings?and the grandson of Jacques Mollet, gardener at the
chateau d'Anet
, where Italian
formal gardening
was introduced to France.
Royal appointment
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Andre Mollet became royal gardener to
Queen Christina
in
Stockholm
. His lasting record is his handsomely-printed folio,
Le Jardin de plaisir
("The Pleasure Garden")
[1]
, Stockholm 1651, which he illustrated with meticulous
copperplate
engravings after his own designs, and which, with an eye to a European aristocratic clientele, he published in Swedish, French and German. In his designs the rich patterning of
parterres
, which had formerly been a garden feature of interest in isolation, was for the first time arranged in significant relation to the plan of the house. Mollet's designs coordinated the elements of scythed turf?making its debut here as an essential element of garden design?with gravel paths, basins and
fountains
, parterres,
bosquets
and
allees
.
Summoned to England
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Mollet was summoned to England in the 1620s to lay out gardens for
Charles I of England
and
Henrietta Maria
at
St James's Palace
, and he later published his design for the parterres of the privy garden in his
Le jardin de plaisir
.
[1]
Mollet was perhaps the designer of parterres at
Wilton House
.
[2]
Henrietta Maria was Mollet's main patron, and she sent him back to France to her mother
Marie de' Medici
with a request for fruit trees and flowers.
[3]
By 1633 he was in the service of
Prince Frederick Henry of Orange
, for whom he laid out
parterres en broderie
that included the
lion rampant
of the prince's coat-of-arms, in turf and clipped
boxwood
, set in colored gravels at
Huis Honselaarsdijk
, and at the prince's other main residence,
Huis ter Nieuwburg
near
Rijswijk
.
Return to France
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Garden view, south elevation of Wimbledon Palace. 1678 Engraving by Henry Winstanley
Mollet returned to France in 1635, but he was back in England by 1642, when he was designing gardens for
Queen Henrietta-Maria
at
Wimbledon Palace
. The house and gardens were described in a survey made in November 1649.
[4]
His work included the Orange Garden, divided into four knots with an Orange House.
[5]
A richly decorated room with a tiled floor "below stairs" in the service quarters of the main house, known as the "lower Spanish room", was used by the gardeners to plant orange and pomegranate trees in boxes.
[6]
Mollet presumably returned to France after the outbreak of the
English Civil War
later that year, and dropped from sight. In the autumn of 1646, a Swedish delegation arrived in Paris, led by Christina's favourite, the connoisseur
Magnus Gabriel De la Gardie
, who was so pleased with recent French developments in the art of gardens that he engaged Mollet for the queen on the spot. Mollet took on two assistants and provided himself with orange and lemon trees and
pomegranates
, with
myrtle
,
laurel trees
and
Spanish jasmine
,
[7]
all of which were tender and destined for an
orangerie
. He also procured
tulip
bulbs and
ranunculus
roots. Then there was a frustrating delay of a full season before the official confirmation arrived.
Sweden
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Mollet's stay in Sweden lasted five years, during which he introduced to Sweden the French
parterres en broderie
patterned like
Baroque
textiles. He modernized the existing gardens linked to the
royal palace in Stockholm
and laid out a new garden in the outskirts of Stockholm on the site of a former hop-garden, the
Humlegarden
. The introduction of a Baroque garden style in Sweden dates to this decade, with the encouragement of progressive
Francophile
architects like
Nicodemus Tessin the Elder
and
Jean de la Vallee
, with whom Mollet had worked in Holland, together with the eager commissions from Swedish nobles that Mollet received. The results are documented in
Erik Dahlbergh
's topographical
Suecia antiqua et hodierna
. Though Mollet left Sweden in 1653, his son
Jean Mollet
remained in Sweden for the rest of his life, and Medard Gue, one of Andre Mollet's original French assistants, assumed an independent role in Swedish gardening.
Soon Mollet was in London, whence he received a passport to travel abroad once more in 1653. With the
English Restoration
in 1660, conditions for ambitious garden-building were once more propitious, and Mollet was listed as a royal gardener, gardener-in-chief for
St. James's Park
. An English edition of
Le Jardin de plaisir
appeared in London in 1670, as
The Pleasure Garden.
Mollet's brother, the younger Claude Mollet, was passed over in favour of
Andre Le Notre
as chief gardener at the
Palace of the Tuileries
, in 1649.
See also
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Mollet's French predecessors in the art of gardening:
Notes
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- ^
Rufus Bird, Simon Thurley, Michael Turner,
St James's Palace: From Leper Hospital to Royal Court
(Yale, 2022), pp. 47?48.
- ^
Sten Karling, 'The importance of Andre Mollet', Elisabeth B. MacDougall & Franklin Hamilton Hazlehurst,
The French Formal Garden
(Dumbarton Oaks, 1974), p. 18.
- ^
Gayle Brandow Samuels,
Enduring Roots: Encounters with Trees, History, and the American Landscape
(Rutgers, 1999), p. 49:
Mary Anne Everett Green
,
Letters of Queen Henrietta Maria
(London, 1857), pp. 19?20.
- ^
John Caley
,
'Survey of the Manor of Wimbledon',
Archaeologia
, 10 (London, 1792), pp. 399?448
- ^
David Jacques,
Gardens of Court and Country: English Design, 1630?1730
(Yale, 2017), pp. 82?83.
- ^
John Caley
, 'Survey of the Manor of Wimbledon',
Archaeologia
, 10 (London, 1792), p. 401.
- ^
Karling, p. 21
References
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