Paintings of the Tuileries Gardens: 1 To Monet

If you have ever visited Paris, you will surely have walked in the Tuileries Gardens stretching from the Louvre to the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe, on the bank of the River Seine, in the heart of the city, and where we visit this weekend.

With its origin as an ornamental Florentine garden for Catherine de Medicis’ Tuileries Palace in 1564, it has been open to the public for nearly 450 years. Over those centuries it has changed size and content. When the French Revolution started in 1789, it saw its fair share of bloodshed, and Jacques-Louis David the artist started to redevelop the gardens to his design.

By 1800, when Napoleon moved into the palace, it was used for an incongruous mixture of public promenade and relaxation, and military parades. On 23 May 1871 the palace buildings were burned by Communards in revolt; when the Tuileries Palace was finally demolished in 1883, the space that it had occupied was taken over as an extension to the gardens.

Plan of the modern Jardin des Tuileries, Paris. By Paris 16. Wikimedia Commons.

Today it retains two substantial buildings: the Jeu de Paume and Musée de l’Orangerie, both at the Place de la Concorde end and almost surrounded by terraces. Its broad Grande Allée joins the massive Arc de Triomphe with its smaller sister, the Arc de Triomphe de Carrousel, by the Louvre. Depending on the season, the gardens may be busy with runners, noisy with childrens’ amusements, or a well of relative calm amid the rumbling rush of Paris and its traffic.

The Rococo painter Jean-Antoine Watteau doesn’t appear to have painted the gardens themselves, but in Les Champs Élysées (c 1719) may show the gardens on the other side of what is now the Place de la Concorde.

Jean-Antoine Watteau (1684-1721), Les Champs Élysées (c 1719), oil on panel, 31.4 x 40.6 cm. The Wallace Collection, London. Wikimedia Commons.

The group of aristocrats feasting and cavorting in a luxuriant autumn landscape is typical of the sub-genre known as fête galante, showing the aristocracy outdoors at play, usually in mythological settings. These works were intended to circumvent the traditional order of merit of painting genres, which rated mythological and historical scenes highly, while allowing Watteau to paint images of the clients who paid for his paintings. It may have been that the title given to the painting was also a deliberate double entendre, covering both the earthly location and that in mythology: ‘the Elysian Fields’, the final resting place of the heroic and virtuous.

Jean-Baptiste Lallemand (c 1710–1803), The Charge of the Prince of Lambesc in the Tuileries Gardens 12 July 1789 (1789-90), Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-Baptiste Lallemand captured a defining moment at the start of the French Revolution in his Charge of the Prince of Lambesc in the Tuileries Gardens 12 July 1789, painted in 1789-90. His style and vocabulary owe much to Watteau and the earlier landscape masters such as Poussin, and show this bizarre combination of violence, panic, and normal routine, without so much as a drop of blood being spilled.

Jean-François Garneray (1755–1837), The Duchess de Berry and her children in their apartment at the Tuileries Palace (1822), watercolour, further details not known. Wikimedia Commons.

Jean-François Garneray’s watercolour showing The Duchesse de Berry and her children in their apartment at the Tuileries Palace was painted in 1822, and reveals the sumptuous interior of the palace before the Communards destroyed it.

Shortly before painting his most famous scene in the Tuileries, Édouard Manet completed a smaller and less ambitious work set in its trees, Children in the Tuileries Garden (c 1861-2).

Édouard Manet (1832–1883), Children in the Tuileries Garden (c 1861-2), oil on canvas, 37.8 x 46 cm, RISD Museum, Rhode Island School of Design, RI. Wikimedia Commons.

Seen now as the work which gave him the idea for his second painting, this shows a small group of children apparently being directed by an older girl in black, with a blue bonnet. There’s an eery impersonality about the figures, though, as they’re either viewed from behind, or have little or no detail in their faces.

Édouard Manet (1832–1883), Music in the Tuileries (1862), oil on canvas, 76.2 × 118.1 cm, The National Gallery, London, and the Hugh Lane, Dublin. Courtesy of National Gallery (CC), via Wikimedia Commons.

Manet’s Music in the Tuileries from 1862 is one of ten paintings shared between the National Gallery in London, and the Hugh Lane in Dublin, as part of the Hugh Lane bequest, and is currently in Dublin.

Packed into its rhythmic layout of trees are members of the fashionable Parisian crowd, who have come to listen to the music, socialise, and chat. Historians have identified many of Manet’s circle among them: the poet Baudelaire, novelist Gautier, composer Offenbach, Fantin-Latour the painter, and the artist’s brother Eugène, a painter who married Berthe Morisot, the Impressionist.

Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens (1867), oil on canvas, 49 x 70 cm, The National Gallery, London. Courtesy of National Gallery (CC), via Wikimedia Commons.

Adolph Menzel’s Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens from 1867 is assumed to have been inspired by Manet’s Music in the Tuileries, and has compositional similarities. He includes some direct quotations of figures in homage to Manet’s work. However, Menzel remained a realist, as shown in finely detailed foliage, foreground shadows and the figures. He was known to have made several sketches in the Tuileries Gardens, but painted this work back in his Berlin studio. Conventionally this would have been based on those sketches, but when Menzel first showed the work he claimed it was executed from memory.

Stanislas Lépine (1835–1892), Nuns and Schoolgirls in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris (1871-3), oil on panel, 15.7 x 23.7 cm, The National Gallery, London. Courtesy of National Gallery (CC), via Wikimedia Commons.

Stanislas Lépine’s Nuns and Schoolgirls in the Tuileries Gardens, Paris from 1871-3 is unusually dark and Barbizon School in style. The nuns and girls are shown emerging from the burnt-out shell of the Tuileries Palace, after the Paris Commune of 1871. The contrast between this sombre group of modestly-dressed figures and previous depictions of the gardens is interesting, and may reflect the spirit of the day in Paris, after the Commune was crushed but before Haussmann’s major reconstruction of the city. Lépine was a pupil of Corot who mostly painted views of Paris in Corot’s style.

Claude Monet painted the Tuileries in four works from about 1876.

Claude Monet (1840–1926), The Tuileries (study) (1876), oil on canvas, 50 x 74 cm, Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Tuileries (study) (1876) is one of two studies that he subsequently signed and dated incorrectly to 1875. This and the finished work below were painted from the top of 198 Rue de Rivoli, where his friend Victor Choquet lived. In the background is the dome of Les Invalides and the spires of the Church of Saint-Clotilde.

Claude Monet (1840–1926), The Tuileries (1876), oil on canvas, 54 x 73 cm, Musée Marmottan-Monet, Paris. Wikimedia Commons.

Tuileries (1876), one of Monet’s two finished works, shows a different view from the same vantage point, for which no studies remain. Wildenstein tells us that this painting was used by Émile Zola in his novel l’Œuvre, as a painting by the hero Claude Lantier of a corner of the Place du Carousel. As is often the case with Monet’s paintings, what appears to be a brisk and spontaneous plein air has many brushstrokes that were applied wet on dry, indicating he worked on this painting in the studio over a period of several days or more. Although figures are gestural, they and the foliage include fine marks and subtle details.