'' by
Albert Edelfelt, 1887 In 1611,
Marie de' Medici, the widow of
Henry IV and the regent for the King
Louis XIII, decided to build a palace in imitation of the
Pitti Palace in her native
Florence. She purchased the Hôtel du Luxembourg (today the
Petit Luxembourg) and began construction of the new palace. She commissioned
Salomon de Brosse to build the palace and a fountain, which still exists. In 1612 she had 2,000
elm trees planted; she directed a series of gardeners, most notably
Tommaso Francini, to build a park in the
style she had known as a child in Florence. Francini planned two terraces with balustrades and
parterres laid out along the axis of the château, aligned around a circular basin. He also built the
Medici Fountain to the east of the palace as a
nymphaeum, an artificial grotto and fountain, without its present pond and statuary. The original garden was just eight hectares in size. In 1630 she bought additional land and enlarged the garden to thirty hectares, and entrusted the work to
Jacques Boyceau de la Barauderie, the intendant of the royal
Tuileries Garden and the early
gardens of Versailles. He was one of the early theorists of the new and more formal
garden à la française, and he laid out a series of squares along an east–west alley closed at the east end by the Medici Fountain, and a rectangle of parterres with broderies of flowers and hedges in front of the palace. In the center he placed an octagonal basin with a fountain, with a perspective toward what is now the
Paris Observatory. Later monarchs largely neglected the garden. In 1780, the Comte de Provence, the future
Louis XVIII, sold the eastern part of the garden for real estate development. Following the
French Revolution, however, the leaders of the
French Directory expanded the garden to forty hectares by confiscating the land of the neighboring religious order of the
Carthusian monks. The architect
Jean-François Chalgrin, the architect of the
Arc de Triomphe, took on the task of restoring the garden. He remade the Medici Fountain and laid out a long perspective from the palace to the observatory. He preserved the famous pepiniere, or nursery garden of the Carthusian order, and the old vineyards, and kept the garden in a formal French style. During and after the
July Monarchy, the park became the home of a large population of statues; first the queens and famous women of France, lined along the terraces; then, in 1880s and 1890s, monuments to writers and artists, a small-scale model by
Bartholdi of his
Liberty Enlightening the World (commonly known as the
Statue of Liberty) and one modern sculpture by
Zadkine. In 1865, during the reconstruction of Paris by
Napoleon III, the rue de l'Abbé de l'Épée, (now rue Auguste Comte) was extended into the park, cutting off about seven hectares, including a large part of the old nursery garden. The building of new streets next to the park also required moving and rebuilding the Medici Fountain to its present location. The long basin of the fountain was added at this time, along with the statues at the foot of the fountain. During this reconstruction, the chief architect of parks and promenades of Paris,
Gabriel Davioud, under the leadership of
Adolphe Alphand, built new ornamental gates and fences around the park, and polychrome brick garden houses. He also transformed what remained of the old Chartreux nursery garden, at the south end of the park, into an
English garden with winding paths, and planted a fruit garden in the southwest corner. He kept the regular geometric pattern of the paths and alleys, but did create one diagonal alley near the Medici fountain, which opened a view of the
Panthéon. The garden in the late nineteenth century contained a marionette theater, a music kiosk, greenhouses, an apiary (or bee-house); a rose garden, the fruit orchard, and about seventy works of sculpture and an orangerie. == Art exhibitions ==