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Introduction

JOSEPH DISPONZIO

Claude-Henri Watelet’s Essai sur les jardins (Essay on Gardens) has long been a staple in the study of the picturesque garden in France. Its brevity belies its impact on the aesthetics of sensibility of the eighteenth century, especially as they directed the conception and development of picturesque gardening in pre-Revolutionary France. Yet, outside the small circle of scholars, it is a work little appreciated and seldom considered.¹ Its obscurity has less to do with its artistic merit than with those who have written the history of the French picturesque, as well as the ambivalence the French have had for an art form tainted by a foreign import—the English garden. Fortunately, the history of the French contribution to the development of the jardin anglais (English garden) is in the process of being rewritten, and Watelet’s Essay occupies a central place within it.²

Watelet himself is somewhat better known than his garden essay. Born in Paris on August 28, 1718, he became a fixture in academic, artistic, and philosophes circles. He died in his native city some sixty-eight years later on January 12, 1786, having lived a charmed life of privilege, which if not standard for a man of his station, was enhanced by his innate gifts for aesthetic pleasures. He was born rich, considerably so. His father was a receveur général des finances—somewhat like a regional tax collector—a royal sinecure Watelet inherited, along with his father’s fortune, at age twenty-two. With his livelihood secure, but with no particular penchant or aptitude for finance, Watelet embarked on a life of refined leisure devoted to the beaux arts. As was appropriate for someone of his avocation and wealth, he took young artists under his wing, frequented and supported the intellectual and artistic salon culture of the day, and was a host of considerable charm and generosity. His friends and acquaintances, drawn from the upper levels of pre-Revolutionary Parisian society, included both artists and arbiters of taste, among them François Boucher, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Abel-François Poisson, marquis de Marigny, and Anne-Claude-Philippe, comte de Caylus.

Although 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 German and French from 1779 to 1785.⁸

These are only the more prominent books published. Others were written, but remained in manuscript, such as François-Henri, duc d’Harcourt’s Traité de la décoration des dehors, des jardins et des parcs (Treatise on the Decoration of the Outdoors, Gardens, and Parks), written in the mid-1770s, but published only in the early twentieth century.⁹ To these works must be added the myriad didactic poems, polemics, essays, and other printed matter which all entered the debate on the new style of gardening.¹⁰

Notwithstanding the number of texts published in such a brief period, there was little consensus on what the garden might look like, other than it being something different from the Le Nôtre style.¹¹ All authors implicitly concurred that the creation of differing landscape characters was essential to the garden design and its subsequent effect on the senses. But they disagreed on the means. The degree to which “Art”—the evidence of human intervention—was apparent in the landscape composition became a focus of contention. For Whately in England and Morel in France, the elements of nature, artfully assisted by man, were sufficient. For Chambers and Carmontelle, nature alone was not enough. For them, the garden required evident artistry. The diverging aesthetics was most apparent in disagreements over presence or absence of structures, and other nonnatural elements, in the landscape—a topic Rousseau broached on a visit to England in the mid-1760s. Not surprisingly, he preferred “cottages” to “temples,” thus foreshadowing a lively debate on the style of fabriques (architectural follies) in the picturesque garden.¹² Such debate would become central in association theory. One need only compare Brown’s Blenheim to Chambers’s Kew, or Morel and Girardin’s Ermenonville to Carmontelle’s Monceau to realize how little uniformity there was to picturesque style. In their treatment of pure landscape features, Blenheim and Ermenonville try to mask indications of human intervention, and for the most part avoid exotic structures. On the other hand, Kew, and in particular Monceau, are filled with artful and exotic contrivances.

The unprecedented number of garden theory books published in this single decade only underscores the receptive climate to the new genre, the appreciation of which made it no longer a novelty, but a received notion of an informed public.¹³ In style, content, and manner of writing, these books were in new theoretical territory. Though tethered to a previous garden heritage, they assume an unmistakable, original, and wholly self-contained quality that sets them apart from previous garden literature. For the most part they contain no plans, offer no prescriptions, ignore geometry and proportions, and to all intents and purposes contain little practical information, such as plant lists, or technical guidance, such as surveying or drainage tips. Rather, these texts are heavily weighted with pure landscape description in a direct appeal to the imagination. Without exception they expand the scope of design practice beyond the utility of domestic convenience in a concerted effort to create landscapes that stir the emotions. While some previous authors, such as Dézallier d’Argenville, encouraged a look beyond the garden wall, these texts demonstratively engage a distant prospect rich in pleasure, utility, industry, and ruin.

Their common goal was to elevate landscape gardening to an independent branch of fine arts divorced from and, for some authors such as Whately, superior to landscape painting. Further, the writers of the new texts, who for the most part were not trained in the design disciplines, implicitly or explicitly recognized the distinction between architects—the traditional garden designers—and the designer of picturesque gardens, as yet unnamed. Without exception, the writers disavowed the architect’s place in the creation of the new genre. Henceforth architecture theory—as codified by Blondel, for example—would no longer be the arbiter of taste in garden design. Gone were geometry and symmetry, the formal imperatives of the regular garden. Moreover, abandoning the pure and abstract geometric vocabulary of eternal and immutable forms allowed for an existential measure of temporality.¹⁴ Doing so opened the way for the garden to be conceptualized as a human domain independent of God.¹⁵

Moulin Joli and the Essay on Gardens

Though the Essay made a tardy entry into the publishing history of the picturesque garden, Watelet had been practicing for decades the new garden art his book espoused. In 1750 he began to acquire three small islands in the Seine at Colombes, downstream from Paris, where he created a country retreat known as Moulin Joli—so called after an on-site working mill. The place became a de facto proving ground where the gentleman gardener could experiment with the new notions of the picturesque. Watelet probably began to improve the grounds immediately, although the construction history of Moulin Joli is not certain and its acquisition history has only recently been uncovered.¹⁶ Of interest, while Watelet bought the property and saw to its improvements, he was not the owner of record. Rather, his mistress and her husband held legal title, though their ownership was not common knowledge at the time. Presumably, Watelet’s real-estate largess speaks of his love for Mme Le Comte, but the circumstances, or benefits, of such an arrangement have yet to be sorted out. Nevertheless, Watelet spent a fortune—his own—creating his Elysium on the Seine.¹⁷

Moulin Joli is reputedly the first picturesque garden in France, though its plan seems strikingly devoid of “picturesqueness.” One might say that its claim to the genre is literal, as it was depicted in paintings, drawings, and engravings by artists such as François Boucher, Jean Le Prince, Jean-Claude de Saint-Non, and Hubert Robert. In virtually all images Moulin Joli suggests a rural landscape of deferred maintenance, if not calculated neglect. Nonetheless, the mixture of the water mill, row boats, fishermen, laundresses, with tender lovers, polite society, and Latin inscriptions carved into trees made Moulin Joli a corporeal landscape of the agréable (pleasurable) and the utile (useful), the pastoral ideal that pervades Watelet’s Essay. Whatever its true appearance—it has long since been destroyed—Moulin Joli was a destination for Parisian society. Its renown was no doubt enhanced with the publication of the Essay, which contained a chapter-long description of the property. Moulin Joli’s importance was given a royal imprimatur in the summer of 1774 with a visit by Louis XVI and his queen. Although Watelet’s station could warrant hosting the monarchs, their detour was less a social call than a reconnaissance study of the garden sensation Watelet had created. Soon afterwards, Marie-Antoine began her Hameau at Versailles.

If Moulin Joli was the product of Watelet’s theory avant la lettre, it was left for the Essay on Gardens to describe the thinking that occasioned it. The book was immediately recognized for its contribution to the new style of gardening, and with its publication France made a forthright entry into the debate. Watelet fashioned his theory by incorporating the intellectual and aesthetic debates of the time, and in the process set the theoretical standard of picturesque practice. All subsequent French books on the subject would use it as a basis, if not borrow from it directly. Although the Essay followed Whately’s Observations and Chambers’s Dissertation, and cannot and does not avoid the influence of these works, Watelet’s book signals an independent contribution to the French treatment of picturesque theory.¹⁸

To be sure, the climate was fertile for its reception, but perhaps what most contributed to its success was its modest ambition. As its title states, the work is an essay, better read in one sitting than studied at length. In style, it is intensely personal, and its frequent rambles suggest a transcription of a guided tour of Moulin Joli by Watelet himself. The work pleases most when appreciated for its grace, rather than gardening prescriptions. Overall, the Essay sets a soothing, civil tone that resonates remarkably well with the society to which it is addressed.

1. Moulin Joli, plan, ca. 1780. Archives Nationales, Paris.

The Essay was well received by the public—so much so that Watelet planned a second edition¹⁹—and by the press. Though Morel objected to the book’s poor organization and lack of technical expertise,²⁰ and Grimm had problems with discordant neologisms, such as ostensive (“ostentatious”),²¹ Jean-François de La Harpe, among the most respected literary critics of the day, wrote quite favorably in the Mercure de France: “What is of interest in his style is that it seems to belong to one of gentle manners and agreeable character, and all those who will see the touching description of his country retreat will wish to live there with him.”²² And the weekly Affiches pointedly praised the Essay’s refreshing didactic style and serious tone, which did not harm its grace.²³ Hirschfeld paid Watelet the complement of including large sections of the Essay in his Theorie der Gartenkunst, as well as freely adapting a good bit of its theory. And in a measure of how influential Watelet’s book would become—and by extension that of picturesque theory in general—Nicolas Le Camus de Mézières dedicated his book Le Génie de l’architecture; ou, l’Analogie de cet art avec nos sensations (The Genius of Architecture; or, The Analogy of that Art with Our Sensations, 1780) to Watelet. Le Camus praised Watelet’s sensitivity, vision, and delicate touch.²⁴

To assess the Essay fully, we must recall that it was intended as part of a general study of taste that Watelet left incomplete at the time of his death. Thus, although it can be read as an autonomous work, the book does not present a fully formulated, coherent theory. Nevertheless, it sufficiently established the aims and methods of the French picturesque, and argued—politely, yet forcefully—for the inclusion of landscape gardening among the liberal arts. The point was not moot. Although gardening had always been appreciated, it held a somewhat stepchild status in the hierarchy of the fine arts. Thomas Whately took up the gauntlet in the opening sentence of his Observations: “Gardening, in the perfection to which it has been lately brought in England, is entitled to a place of considerable rank among the liberal arts.” Watelet seconded the Englishman directly—“my subject is related to the liberal arts”—but broadens the discussion. He distinguishes between the mechanical and liberal arts—a polarity evident throughout the book—and reflects on the driving forces and consequences of their production. And he introduces a related polarity, that of the potential of art to be both useful and agreeable—something ideally suited to the picturesque garden. Believing that the gardens had reached offensive extremes of excess through artificial means (fueled by money and industry), Watelet opines for a return to a simpler garden more in line with nature; one that relies on nature alone, rather than artful (mechanical) contrivances. As he wrote in his article on “art” in the Encyclopédie des beaux-arts, only the liberal arts could create sensations that satisfied the soul.²⁵ Thus the garden, whose metaphysical goal was spiritual satisfaction, could fulfill its duty only with a return to the libéral.

It is important to remember that Watelet was writing in an Enlightenment atmosphere greatly influenced by the writings of Rousseau, whom Watelet knew. In our postmodern, postindustrial world, it is hard to appreciate the importance the eighteenth century gave to art as a moral and edifying force in civilization. Such an aesthetic discourse—which dates from antiquity—is, one might say, the metanarrative of Watelet’s Essay. The corollary argument is the corruption of the arts by the very civilization that nurtures and sustains them. The immediate source of this chain of thought was very local: Rousseau’s Discours sur les sciences et les arts (Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts) of 1750, and the more important Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes (Discourse on the Origins and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men) of 1755. In the first discourse, Rousseau warns of the corrupting effects of luxury and idleness; in the second he paints a broader canvas, calling to task civilization itself. These seminal works of Enlightenment political and social philosophy established the discourse of nature as a norm, which would sanction the claim for the moral authority, if not superiority, of rural living. Implicit in Rousseau’s philosophy is the idea that a return to nature is a return to origins. Rousseau would again address these themes in his novels Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (1761), and Emile, ou, de l’éducation (1762). Watelet is not as radical a thinker, but Rousseau’s thought pervades the Essay. Watelet heeds Rousseau’s message of the corrupting tendency of cities (“laboratories [of] artificial pleasures”) and praises the purer virtues of country living. In his social interpretation of landscape design, the garden—as the space of mediation between nature and art—becomes for Watelet the locus of moral restitution of the human mind, body, and spirit. While the peaceful bliss of country living was in reality an impossible ideal for people obsessed with fashion, taste, and social hierarchy,²⁶ the decorum of a polite society transposed to the country held wide appeal.²⁷

As a didactic work, the Essay is ostensibly about the creation of landscape garden archetypes of differing scenes. This is not at all surprising coming from an academic painter whose other written works are preoccupied with generic categories. In his Art de peindre of 1760, two of the four songs are devoted to picturesque and poetic compositions. In his Dictionnaire article on landscape painting, he distinguishes among several landscape prototypes, with a clear preference for ideal representations, as they more than any other require the most artistic genius, skill, and imagination.²⁸ In the Essay, Watelet presents a set of landscape styles—the picturesque (pittoresque), the poetic (poétique), and the romantic (romanesque)—to which the designer has recourse in the creation of gardens. Watelet ascribes individual characters to each category, which can be further inflected into any number of nuances through the use of the elements of nature and artistic constructions. A judicious selection of an initial genre with designed modifications and adjustments results in innumerable scenes, each with a particular effect on the senses. Moreover, a combination of generic scenes can provide for a changing tableau—not unlike scenes in a theater, to which he makes reference—and thus further heightens sensations. Though his treatment of all genres is evenhanded, he is evidently partial to a picturesque pastoral—elaborated in the last chapter, entitled “The French Garden,” which is otherwise a description of Moulin Joli. With its working mill, shepherds, fisherman, and overt rusticity, the country retreat approaches a modern ferme ornée (embellished farm) whose combination of the agreeable with the useful is not only felicitous but morally worthy.

The chapter on Moulin Joli has a not so subtle nationalist motive. Although the chapter is intended to present a summary of the precepts and theory described in the book, and to give a virtual notion of a French picturesque garden, its title, “The French Garden,” is not neutral. Consider that the penultimate chapter of the book is devoted to a description of a Chinese garden. Watelet includes the chapter as a sincere appreciation of presumed Chinese garden design (he never traveled to China and is relying on a description of others), yet in doing so he presents a recognizable challenge to England’s authorship of the garden style that bears its name. Earlier in the book Watelet had already planted the doubt: “And this nation [England], it is said, borrowed the ideas for its own gardens from the Chinese.” Here Watelet is participating in what was to become a long tradition of French historiography of garden design—begun by Latapie—where nationalism plays a role in designating authorship. For example, the French were quick to modify the designation “English garden” to jardin anglo-chinois. Appending the Sino adjective to the English garden not only deprives the English of their unique contribution, but in time the hyphenated style took on pejorative connotations, at least among the French. Thus Watelet’s consecutive placement of Chinese and “French” garden descriptions may be understood as a genteel prejudicing of the former in preference for the later. While readers can draw their own conclusions, there is no doubt of Watelet’s preference and opinion: no Chinese (read English) gardens for France.²⁹

A number of significant points in Watelet’s treatise are worth noting that might otherwise be subsumed in a discussion of genre. For example, though he writes “among the known arts, the one whose ideas are most closely related to the art of gardens is that of painting,” his purpose is to demonstrate their difference. In the chapter on “Modern Parks,” which is devoted to a discussion of the picturesque genre, he pointedly distinguishes picturesque garden design as a separate artistic enterprise, independent from its namesake art. The designer of landscape gardens, whom he refers to as a décorateur (decorator), may emulate picturesque compositions, but a landscape garden is inherently different. Whereas painting accords only one view, the “person viewing picturesque scenes in a park, on the contrary, changes their organization by changing his location.” Ambulation through a garden is not only one of its significant benefits, but essential to the notion of movement, something not possible in painting. Moreover, while moving through a picturesque garden, the visitor is at liberty to experience it as he or she wishes, and thus is unconstrained by the intentions of the designer.

Watelet’s conception of movement is essential to enhancing the effects he wishes to create in the garden, but is also key to his appreciation of the dynamics of space and time in picturesque garden design. He recognizes that the design of landscapes requires an understanding of the simultaneous and mutual dependence of topographic variations of “perspectives, clearings, and elevations” with the “relations and proportions between vacant and occupied space.” Indeed, Watelet is the only picturesque theorist to include a chapter on space. Furthermore, he notes that in gardening, the vegetative cover of the earth—trees, shrubs, grass—as well as the natural movements of wind, clouds, water, trees, and so on, are integral to the conception. Thus Watelet combines the dimensions of space and time to fashion a sophisticated, time-dependent, three-dimensional theory of picturesque garden composition.

In the chapter entitled “Pleasure Gardens,” Watelet continues the important discussion of movement when distinguishing between architecture and gardening, noting the different aims and objectives of each. His qualification that “until now” the architect was the traditional designer of gardens is a direct challenge to architectural practice. But the seizure of garden design from the architect is based on well-argued, theoretical grounds. Architecture is essentially a static building practice, concerned with the immediate and stationary, and restricted to one time and one place. It requires regularity and symmetry for clarity. Picturesque gardening is the antithesis of architecture; it overcomes the inertia of architectural stasis through direct engagement in space and time. Movement is the key to the garden theory of Watelet: “Movement, that very spirit of nature, that inexhaustible source of the interest she inspires.”

Watelet also engages topical aesthetic debates dealing with association theory and artistic mimesis or imitation in his discussion of the poetic and romantic garden genres. The poetic, which draws from “mythologies and . . . ancient or foreign practices and customs,” and the romantic, whose actions are “more vague, more personal,” require imagination and invention to set in motion an association of ideas to recall a certain time, place, climate, and story. As such, these genres draw most heavily from learning or individual experience. But they are also the genres most open to the abuse of artificial or foreign effects, such as fabriques (architectural follies) and other contrivances that suggest “tales of fiction and fairyland.” All these devices are implicated in the theory of association, which Watelet hints at but never fully develops. Nevertheless, Watelet, more in line with the Englishman Whately than his own countryman Carmontelle, reproves emblematic devices and warns of the “errors of taste” that distort the imagination.³⁰

Related to association was the theory of artistic mimesis. At issue is the degree to which Art should lord over Nature in the creation of the garden. The argument was an area of fundamental contention among the garden theorists and was not confined to national boundaries. For some, like Chambers and Carmontelle, nature was too paltry and uninteresting on its own ever to be pleasing and effective at moving the soul; nature needed improving. Whately held the opposite view. Morel agreed with Whately on the need to temper artifice in the garden, but went even further: he removed landscape gardening from the imitative arts, something seconded by the French academician Antoine Quatremère de Quincy.³¹ Watelet took somewhat of a middle ground. He allowed for pastoral and rural imagery, but shunned artificiality and foreign influences, although he constructed a Chinese bridge at Moulin Joli. Such contradictions were standard fare and detract little from his essential point that “the nature of the terrain is of primary importance in determining the character of a garden scene,” and that the accompanying elements of nature alone were sufficient to create a spectrum of moods necessary to arouse the soul. Though he tacitly accepts that gardening is an art of manipulation, the key to a successful picturesque garden is to balance the equation between artifice and nature. His dictum is “[come] as close as possible to artifice, while abandoning nature as little as possible,” and the inevitable conclusion follows a few pages latter: “Any art that shows itself too clearly destroys the effect of Art.”

It is important to note that Watelet’s discussion of garden genres and aesthetic debates contains the overarching metaphysical argument of the Essay, and indeed of all picturesque garden theory: the affective powers of inanimate objects, whether natural or otherwise, to stir the senses and move the soul. Thus the discussion of landscape genres is about creating landscapes of different characters, which can elicit different emotional responses from terror to delight, pain to sensual pleasure. Recognizing the practical and sensible wants of man, Watelet’s conception of the picturesque garden appealed to both body and spirit, and in the process combined material satisfaction with spiritual enlightenment.³²

With these precepts, Watelet is operating wholly within the realm of philosophical empiricism, which had a dramatic impact on all picturesque theory. No doubt, Watelet’s education and association with Enlightenment society colored, if not instigated, his explicit acceptance of the mechanisms of empirical sensationalism. In all probability, his direct source was the Abbé Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Locke’s disciple in France. Condillac’s Traité des sensations (Treatise on the Sensations, 1754), which preceded Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757) by three years, and its French translation by a decade, was undoubtedly known to Watelet. Condillac’s influence is evident in Watelet’s early poem, L’Art de peindre, in which he explores the activation of the senses through art. Otherwise lost in a sentimental verse—“the artist must paint with his soul”—Watelet includes unmistakable sensationalist tropes. For example, in Song Four he recalls human passions of pleasure and pain, love and hate—the binary toggle switches Condillac uses to bring his famous statue to life:

What the senses, when aroused, contribute to the passions,

The soul returns to the senses by the way it expresses them.

Joy and sadness, pleasure and pain,

Excite every nerve, flow through every vein.

Desire and love, hatred and anger,

Each has its own traits, its look, its gestures, and its colors.³³

Watelet introduces such sensationalist writing into his Essay almost from the start: “we wish not only that both the materials of artistic creations and their uses bring pleasure to the senses, but also that the mind and soul in turn be touched and stirred by their appeal.” Although he does not call attention to the empiricist heritage, it is safe to say that the society to which his Essay is addressed was well informed on the sources of his metaphysical inspiration. The importance of this heritage should not be underestimated or overlooked, as it greatly influenced subsequent picturesque garden theory and, perhaps more important, provided the theoretical means for designing gardens independent of previous practice. It is no exaggeration to say that with Watelet’s sensationalist based picturesque garden theory, gardening in France had entered a new era.

Watelet concludes his Essay on Gardens with a “letter to a friend.” It is a charming description of a garden he knows intimately—Moulin Joli. It is artfully rendered with a delicateness and refinement so befitting the era. He paints a gentle picture—more watercolor than oil—of a setting for a civil and hospitable society lived in rural bliss. Yet there is something disquieting, if not sad, in Watelet’s nostalgic description of his beloved island retreat. The site seems a passive landscape, one long neglected. Three river islands made of mud and earth, with no stone quays, no harsh or hard-edged embankments. The bridges are wood and wobbly, the footpaths earthen. The air is fresh and cool. Muted birdsong, gentle murmurs of a languid Seine, Boucher-toned milkmaids, wood nymphs, and a population of real and imaginary citizens inhabit this paradise. But the season is late. The river is low. The trees are old and full, the air at midday heavy. There is a spent quality to the landscape signaled by an eroding dike.

It is indeed ironic that at the time Watelet was putting the finishing touches to his garden essay he was facing bankruptcy. Worse, his health was failing. A little over a decade later he would be dead, and the Revolution would come and wipe out the society so dear to him. As for his Moulin Joli, what the Revolution did not destroy, time and commerce did. By the early nineteenth century, the island retreat was all but gone, its trees sold, its structures abandoned and in ruin, its contours washed away.

Oh, do not dismiss the worth of time,

For while the water rushes forth,

The wheel must meet its rapid beat.

So your days keep spinning on.

Enjoy, enjoy your allotted time.³⁴