The château was disadvantaged by its lack of a view of the Seine. Moreover, Madame du Barry considered the reception areas to be inadequate. She thus decided to build, surveying the valley of the Seine, a small separate building that would include reception rooms, the famous
Pavillon de Musique de la Comtesse du Barry.
History Proposals were requested of
Charles de Wailly and
Claude Nicolas Ledoux. In spite of the negative opinions given by several of her circle, notably
Gabriel, Mme du Barry decided to retain Ledoux as the architect for the project. He was then at the beginning of his career. The design was completed in 1770 and construction was carried out in 1771. The inauguration took place on 2 September 1771 in the presence of the King. A play by
Charles Collé was performed,
La partie de chasse de Henri IV, and dinner was served with music (the musicians complained about the exiguity of the platforms of the dining room, now shut off by mirrors) followed by a display of fireworks. In 1773, Mme du Barry, obviously satisfied with the pavilion, ordered from Ledoux the plans for a large château which was to incorporate the small building. The death of Louis XV in 1774 put an end to this project before it was begun. The pavilion thus remained in its original state until the second half of the 19th century. On an unspecified date, it was disfigured by the addition of a
Mansard roof and shutters to the windows. When it was acquired in 1923 by the perfumer
François Coty from the politician and industrial
Louis Loucheur, the house was found to be subject to a grave disorder because of the sinking slope on which it was built. François Coty called upon the architect Charles Édouard Mewès, son of
Charles Mewès (1860–1914) to displace it several meters. This radical solution saved the building from erosion of the slope, which would have entirely destroyed it within the next few years. The move was accompanied by profound transformations: the mansard roof was converted into an attic sheltering five bedrooms, while vast dependences were created in the basement to arrange a perfume laboratory, an electric generator, kitchens and a swimming pool. In 1959, the house was bought by the
American School of Paris, which then settled there. In cleaning the building some Nazi materials were found. The story was that while the Germans occupied the building in World War II, the
French Resistance was active in the tunnels of the old stone quarries under the building. These quarries had provided some of the stone used to build Paris. The school wanted to expand by putting up new buildings but the underlying tunnels made the ground unstable. A project was initiated to pump cement into the tunnels but this was abandoned, and the American School moved to another site in
Saint Cloud. In 2022 the Pavilion was listed by Sotheby's at a asking price of 60 million euros, sadly not mentioning any of its history and provenance.
Architecture The pavilion at Louveciennes is one of the most successful achievements of Ledoux and a prototype for
Neoclassical architecture. The entry, in the form of an open semi-circular apse, with a
coffered half-dome ceiling simply closed by a screen of Ionic columns, has a disposition already used by Ledoux in the house of
Marie-Madeleine Guimard on the roadway of Antin. The coffered domes would have been an astonishing feature to Parisians, Svend Eriksen has observed. It leads to a room which has the form of a square with apsidal ends, intended as a dining room, where the inaugural dinner took place. Behind this room is an
enfilade of three living rooms, the central
salon du Roi flanked by salons that are each of a different plan, opening onto the view of the Seine below. Various services and the kitchen were established in the rusticated half-basement. The side towards the Seine is known from a drawing made by the British neoclassicist
Sir William Chambers: in Chambers' drawing, unlike Ledoux's commemorative engraving (
illustration, right), its three central bays project in the accustomed Gabriel manner, with attached
Ionic columns and
bas-relief panels above the severely plain window openings; in the flanking single bays the windows have plain
entablatures surmounted by low plinths of concave profile. Ledoux's commemorative engraving of 1804 carries the severe façade right across, unbroken; Ledoux's drawings, executed long afterwards, cannot be trusted to represent the original appearance, according to Svend Eriksen, because the architect was in the habit of furnishing his drawings "with impossibly advanced features retrospectively." In either version the elevation reflects "Ledoux's efforts to accentuate the cuboidal structure of a building and to handle the Classical motifs with such precision and economy that the large, reticent wall-surfaces against which they are seen are rendered doubly significant and effective". and straight-legged chairs by the prominent
menuisier Louis Delanois, in the neoclassical style we know as "Louis Seize". There are some surviving chairs of the suite, which was already in production in 1769 and must at first have been intended for the château, though they were used in the pavilion and are seen in Moreau le Jeune's drawing (
illustration, left). The original state of the interiors is known by way of a drawing by
Jean-Michel Moreau representing the dinner offered to Louis XV by Mme du Barry for the inauguration of the house, which can be compared with an engraving by Ledoux. The pilasters were of gray
scagliola with gilt-bronze capitals supplied by Gouthière. The
girandole lights suspended in front of the mirrors between the pilasters were semi-circular, so that with their reflection in the mirrors they appeared to be circular chandeliers hanging in space, a useful ''
trompe-l'œil to enlarge the somewhat cramped space, which was essentially an enlarged vestibule between the entrance and the Salon du Roi''. Mme du Barry commissioned from
Jean-Honoré Fragonard a suite of four large paintings for Louveciennes. The painter, who attached much importance to this commission, represented
The Progress of Love. However, his masterpieces displeased the commissioner, the reason for the displeasure is still argued by art historians. A 19th century reading claimed that the "lovers" in the series bore too close a resemblance to du Barry and the King. A later theory was that the paintings were in the Rococo style and du Barry's pavilion was decidedly Neo Classical, thus clashing terribly. After du Barry refused the paintings, Fragonard stored them at his studio in the Louvre. In 1790 Fragonard, his wife and son found themselves living with a cousin, Alexandre Maubert, in
Grasse. As part of their room and board, Fragonard sold his cousin the four panels and painted two more large panels (Reverie and The Triumph of Love), four over-door images of cupids and two long hollyhock panels. The works stayed in the family until the mid-1880s when they were sold to the industrialist
J. P. Morgan. Since 1915, they have been one of the gems of the
Frick Collection in New York. File:Fragonard, Jean-Honoré - The Progress of Love- The Pursuit - 1773.jpg|One of
Fragonard's rejected canvases "The Pursuit" File:Jean Honore Fragonard Surprise.jpg|One of
Fragonard's rejected canvases "The Meeting" File:Fragonard Confession of Love.jpg|One of
Fragonard's rejected canvases "Confession of Love" Image:Fragonard louveciennes.jpg|One of
Fragonard's rejected canvases "The Lover Crowned" Mme du Barry commissioned from
Joseph-Marie Vien replacement paintings on the same subject, now on exhibit at the
Musée du Louvre and the
Château de Chambéry. Vien's neoclassical manner was gaining in popularity at the time and appeared particularly appropriate for the decor she had created in Louveciennes. ==The Park==