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The petit hameau was small, a rustic but in essence ersatz farm (or ferme ornee) meant to evoke a peasant village in Normandy, built on the far side of a landscaped pond. Created in 1783, to designs of the Queen's favoured architect, Richard Mique, the hamlet was complete with farmhouse, dairy, and mill.
Here, it was said, the Queen and her attendants would dress as shepherdesses and milkmaids. Particularly docile, hand-picked cows would be cleaned. These cows would be milked by the ladies, with porcelain milk churns painted to imitate wood specially made by the royal porcelain manufactory at Sèvres. These churns and pails featured the Queen's monogram. The simple and rustic ambiance at the petit hameau has been evoked in paintings by Fragonard; however, inside the farmhouse, the rooms were far from simple, featuring the luxury and comfort to which Marie Antoinette and her ladies were accustomed. Yet, the rooms at the petit hameau allowed for more intimacy than the grand salons at Versailles, or at the Petit Trianon itself. Such model farms operating under principles espoused by the Physiocrats, were fashionable among the French aristocracy at the time, and one primary purpose of the hameau was to add to the ambiance of the Petit Trianon, giving the illusion that the Trianon itself was deep in the countryside rather than within the confines of Versailles.
The garden surroundings of the Petit Trianon, of which the hameau de la Reine is an extension, began their transformation from formal pattern gardens to an informal "natural" garden of winding paths, curving canals and lakes in 1774, under the direction of Antoine Richard, gardener to the Queen. Richard Mique modified the landscape plan to provide vistas of lawn to west and north of the Petit Trianon, encircled by belts of trees. Beyond the lake to the north, the hameau was sited like a garden stage set, initially inspired in its grouping and vernacular building by Dutch and Flemish genre paintings, philosophically influenced by Rousseau's cult of "nature", and reflecting exactly contemporary picturesque garden principles set forth by Claude-Henri Watelet and by ideas of the philosophes, their "radical notions coopted into innocent forms of pleasure and ingenious decoration" as William Adams has pointed out.
"An uninteresting architectural monument, perhaps, and fancifully restored ... a forerunner of nineteenth-century exposition pavilions and the modern theme park., Betsy Rosasco remarked : "during the Revolution a misogynistic, nationalistic and class-driven polemic swirled around the hameau, which had previously seemed a harmless agglomeration of playhouses in which to act out a Boucher pastorale".
The queen was accused by many of being frivolous, and found herself a target of innuendo, jealousy and gossip throughout her reign. For Marie Antoinette, this farm was an escape from the mounting horror of the real world, although to the French people having a queen that pretended to be a peasant for fun only made her image worse. She reigned supreme in this small area, and even the King only went there at her invitation. |
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