French Landscape Garden - Rousseau's Philosophy of The Landscape Garden

Rousseau's Philosophy of The Landscape Garden

The ideas of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) had a major influence on the landscape garden, and he himself was buried in the first important such garden in France, at Ermenonville. Rousseau wrote in 1762, on the "nobility of nature": "Everything is good when it leaves the hand of the creator"; "Everything degenerates in Man's hands." In his novel La Nouvelle Helois Rousseau imagined a perfect landscape, where people could be true to themselves. This imaginary garden became a model for French landscape gardens. The French historian Jurgis wrote: "the theme of this Paradise, once restored by setting free flowers, earth and water, was the guiding principle in the development of landscape gardens. It was a glorification of that which had long been denatured by artifice." In opposing his Elysian Fields, the Orchard at Clarens to the serried trees sculpted into parasols, fans, marmosets, and dragons, Rousseau reawakes this myth with its new liberties.

Rousseau visited England in 1761 and saw the famous gardens, including that at Stowe, but he criticized the mish-mash of different styles there. "It is composed of very beautiful and picturesque places, of which different features have been chosen from different countries," he wrote. "It all seems natural, except the assembly."

René Louis de Girardin, who created the garden at Ermenonville, was an avid pupil of Rousseau. He designed the garden to illustrate the idyllic landscapes described in Rousseau's books. He travelled to Paris, was introduced to Rousseau, and persuaded him to visit the garden and stay in a small cottage designed to resemble the house of Julie, called Elysee, described in Rousseau's novel La Nouvelle Heloise ("Julie, or the new Heloise"). Rousseau came to visit in May 1778 and returned frequently. He stayed at the estate frequently, and was writing Les Confessions and the Les Rêveries du promeneur solitaire (Reveries of a Solitary Walker), and died there that year. His remains were placed in a tomb in a grove of poplar trees on a small island in the lake.

Girardin made the park at Ermenonville a living illustration of Rousseau's ideas; making carefully constructed landscapes, like paintings, designed to invite the visitor to take long walks and to feel pure and simple emotions. The paths were designed to follow the hillsides, climbing up and down, to give a various view, from shadows of groves of trees to sunlight, and meandering to let the viewer delight the scene from different angles and light. Girardin described the purpose of his garden in a book called De la composition des paysages (1777) ("On the Composition of Landscapes":

The principles taken from Rousseau and transformed into avenues and landscapes by Girardin and other garden designers were copied in landscape gardens around France.