Dezallier d'Argenville

The family of Dezallier d'Argenville produced two writers and connoisseurs in the course of the 18th century.

Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d'Argenville (Paris, 1 July 1680–29 November 1765), avocat to the Parlement de Paris and secretary to the king, was a connoisseur of gardening who laid out two for himself and his family, before writing La théorie et la pratique du jardinage (published anonymously, 1709; second edition, 1713), based on his experience and his reading. The majority of the illustrations were by Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond, who was credited as the author in the third edition, 1722. As the work of a gentleman rather than a gardener, as previous French books on gardening had all been, Dezallier d'Argenville's work was laid out like a treatise of architecture, addressed as much to the architect and the patron as to the practicing gardener. As its title suggests, the treatise is composed of two parts: the theoretical principles of the art of fine gardening and its practical applications. The first section considers the principles of siting the maison de plaisance relative to its gardens, techniques of laying out geometric figures in parterres, avenues and formal tree plantations (bosquets), and the planning of garden pavilions and the siting of sculpture, an essential element in the jardin français. The second part applies the principles in earth works, terraces and stairs, and the hydraulics necessary for constructing jeux d'eau: fountains, cascades, pools (bassins) and canals.

His rational principles could adapt formal parterre gardening to the simplified programs available to the upper middle class, which accounts for the immense popularity of his book, which is the central document in the 18th century formal garden in the wake of André Le Nôtre. The work went through thirteen editions in France, where the English mode of landscape design scarcely made itself known before the French Revolution. It was published in a German version and translated into English by the architect John James, as The Theory and Practice of Gardening (1712, with a 2nd edition in 1728, and a 3rd edition in 1743, when the English landscape garden, might have seemed to make its formal designs passé.) Dezallier d'Argenville's Théorique in its English version introduced the Ha-ha, the invisible fence, to English practice.

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