Château de Clagny

The Château de Clagny was a French country house that stood northeast of the Château de Versailles; it was designed by Jules Hardouin-Mansart for Madame de Montespan between 1674 and 1680. Although among the most important of the private residences designed by this great architect, it was demolished in 1769 after years of neglect.

Its appearance can only be traced through the engravings made of it, and scattered references in the archives of the Bâtiments du Roi.

Louis XIV had bought the estate of Clagny from the Hôpital des Incurables of Paris in 1665. On 22 May 1674, Colbert’s son submitted to him a plan designed by the young Mansart, who had used his family ties with the great François Mansart of the previous reign to make himself and his talents known at court. By 12 June, work was ordered to begin at once because Madame de Montespan was anxious to start planting the grounds that very fall. André Le Nôtre designed the layout of the gardens. In August 1675, Madame de Sévigné visited Clagny, which she described to her daughter:

The orangerie, where the "little wood of oranges" wintered at Clagny, was a showpiece itself, paved with marble. In the gardens cabinets de verdure shaped into niches that held sculptures were clipped into the dense woods, fitted with trelliswork dadoes to fill in their sparse bases.

In a portrait painted by Henri Gascar, Madame de Montespan had herself painted while reclining on a baroque canopied couch, its curtains held up by carved cupids, with the barrel-vaulted galerie of Clagny visible behind her, as grand a piece of architecture as any to which a sovereign could yet lay claim. About 1680, Adam-Frans van der Meulen painted a landscape view of a promenade en calèche with Louis XIV, Queen Marie-Thérèse, Madame de Montespan, and the king's son and his wife, which includes in a single coup d'œil both Versailles and Clagny, showing how closely the two châteaux were located.

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