a bachelor, he lived intimately with his mistress, Marguerite Le Comte, a woman of considerable artistic accomplishment in her own right. Having a mistress during the Old Regime was common practice, but Watelet’s ménage was, if not singular, at least special. For the forty or so years that they were together, most of which was lived under the same roof, they shared company with Mme Le Comte’s husband, Jacques-Roger Le Comte. Presumably, Watelet was devoted to his mistress and treated her husband impeccably, for by all contemporary accounts, they lived in respectful, if not peaceful, conjugality, one degree—or bed—removed. All three profited from the situation: the lovers with each other, the husband enjoying companionship without connubial responsibility. They even traveled together, most notably on a celebrated trip to Italy in 1763–1764, culminating in a lavish party given in their honor by the French Academy in Rome. The visit was immortalized in an elegant suite of engravings produced by students of the Academy, set to a poem by Louis Subleyras and drawings by, among others, Hubert Robert.3 In illustration and verse, the visit is recounted through allegory and classical imagery, including a flattering apotheosis of Mme Le Comte being crowned by Apollo, Watelet at her side. The entire work is as much a commemoration of a Grand Tour as a sumptuous album of an enduring and highly compatible love affair.
In addition to his mastery of the etiquette of the day, Watelet distinguished himself in the beaux arts, something for which he had affinity. On his first trip to Rome at eighteen, his talents as a draftsman were recognized by the French Academy, which invited him to participate in drawing classes. In 1747 he became an associate member of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, the first of numerous artistic and learned societies to which he was elected, including—in addition to the most important French academies—those of Berlin, Cordoba, Florence, Madrid, Parma, Rome, and Vienna. Watelet was an accomplished poet, playwright, painter, sculptor, engraver, and musician as well as an art connoisseur. His private collection was considerable and included several hundred engravings and drawings by Rembrandt, whose style Watelet sometimes imitated in his own engravings.4
Watelet began his writing career in the early 1740s with some pastoral fiction and theater pieces. His novel Silvie was politely received at the time, but is justly forgotten today. Better known is his didactic poem L’Art de peindre (The Art of Painting), published in 1760. Written in emulation of Boileau’s Art poétique (1674), Watelet set out to codify in verse the principles of the art of painting. Despite withering criticism by Diderot,5 who thought the text worthless, the work secured Watelet’s inclusion among the immortals of the French Academy in November 1760. The poem established Watelet as a serious student of art theory, as indeed his future career attests. He went on to write some thirty articles related to the arts for Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. At the time of his death he was writing a comprehensive and authoritative dictionary on the arts, Dictionnaire des arts de peinture, de gravure et de sculpture (Dictionary of the Arts of Painting, Engraving, and Sculpture). Pierre-Charles Lévesque completed the work, which subsequently became the Dictionnaire des beaux-arts of Panckoucke’s important Encyclopédie méthodique. Taken as a whole, Watelet’s written corpus constitutes a major project, though left incomplete, on the aesthetics of taste in the eighteenth century.
Background to the Essay on Gardens
To better appreciate Watelet’s Essay on Gardens, a brief accounting of events leading to its publication and immediate aftermath is in order. There is no need to rehearse the development of the English gardening tradition, hereafter called the natural or picturesque in accordance with French preference.6 By the mid-eighteenth century on both sides of the English Channel the regularized French garden of the Le Notre style had yielded to a contrived irregular, indeed natural, garden typology. In fits and starts, beginning with William Kent’s deliberate designs for Chiswick, dating from the 1730s, the picturesque garden began to transform the landscape of Europe. Within a generation or so, garden designers had exposure to the methods of implementing picturesque gardens, but a synthetic theory of the practice was wanting. That is to say, though the new gardening tradition was well established at mid-century, it still lacked an overall theoretical treatment in text. Important gardening books such as Antoine-Joseph Dézallier d’Argenville’s La Théorie et la pratique du jardinage (The Theory and Practice of Gardening, 1709, with multiple, expanded editions following); Stephen Switzer’s Ichnographia, or The Nobleman, Gentleman, and Gardener’s Recreation (1715, with multiple editions following), and Jacques-François Blondel’s Architecture françoise (four volumes, 1752–1756) may have foreshadowed the turn of events to come in the garden, yet they were not by any measure a set of works that constituted a theoretical formulation of the new picturesque art form. All this changed dramatically in the 1770s. In that seminal decade an unprecedented number of texts on the new taste in gardening were published in England, France, and Germany.
The first book that can rightfully claim to be a theoretical treatment of picturesque gardening is Thomas Whately’s Observations on Modern Gardening of 1770. The book’s second edition appeared within months of the first, a third edition followed in 1771, and a fourth in 1777. It was quickly translated into both French and German in 1771. François de Paule Latapie provided the French translation, L’Art de former les jardins modernes ou l’art des jardins anglais, to which he added a lengthy and important introduction. The German translation, Betrachtungen überdas heutige Gartenwesen durch Beyspiele erläutert, was by Johann Ernst Zeiher. The frenzied publication history, and French and German translations, of Whately’s Observations are highly suggestive of the popularity of the gardening style the book professed.
Presenting a different, yet still picturesque, theoretical argument was William Chambers’s Dissertation on Oriental Gardening, published in English and French in 1772, with a second, revised edition in the following year. It, too, was translated into German in 1775. As early as 1757, Chambers had anticipated changing attitudes in his Design of Chinese Buildings, Furniture, Dresses, Machines and Utensiles . . . of 1757, which included an essay on Chinese gardens. This work was also published simultaneously in French.
Challenged by the English, the French soon produced their own works on the aims and methods of the picturesque. Though they were slow to begin publishing by the decade’s end the French had outpaced the English, producing several important works. Watelet’s Essai sur les jardins of 1774 was the first French contribution to the theoretical debate and was given a German translation in 1776. It was followed in quick succession by Antoine-Nicolas Duchesne’s Considérations sur le jardinage (Considerations on Gardening) and Sur la formation des jardins (On the Formation of Gardens), both of 1775 (the latter given a second edition in 1779); Jean-Marie Morel’s Théorie des jardins (Theory of Gardens) of 1776 (enlarged, second edition in 1802), and René de Girardin’s De la composition des paysages in 1777 (second edition in 1793). Girardin’s work was translated into English in 1783 by D. Malthus as An Essay on Landscape, the only French treatise to be so. Less theoretical yet important was Louis Carrogis de Carmontelle’s lavish folio Jardin de Monceau (Garden of Monceau), published in 1779. Likewise, George-Louis Le Rouge’s multivolume cahiers on Jardins anglo-chinois à la mode; ou, Détails des nouveaux jardins à la mode (Fashionable Anglo-Chinese Gardens, or Details about Fashionable New Gardens), published between 1776 and 1789, was not an original work, but included several hundred plates of extant and imaginary picturesque gardens, as well as reproducing in its entirety Chambers’s essay of 1757 on Chinese gardens.7
Germany too was caught up in the publishing fervor. The academic philosopher C. C. L. Hirschfeld published his first book on picturesque garden theory, Anmerkungen über die Landhäuser und die Gartenkunst (Observations on Country Houses and Garden Art) in 1773, with a second edition in 1779. A smaller version of his magnum opus, Theorie der Gartenkunst (Theory of Garden Art), was published in 1775 under the same name, with a second edition in 1777, while the full, five-volume treatment of his garden theory appeared simultaneously in
