Jean-Baptiste Le Blond

Jean-Baptiste Alexandre Le Blond (1679 – 10 March 1719) was a French architect and garden designer who became the chief architect of Saint Petersburg in 1716.

He was the son of Jean Le Blond, painter in ordinary to the king, a printseller on the Pont Saint-Michel, Paris, and his wife, Jeanne d'Eu. He studied architecture with his mother's brother Jean Girard, in the service of Philippe I, duc d'Orléans. Jacques-François Blondel implied that he had derived gardening expertise from André Le Nôtre, finding that Le Blond was

Indeed, Le Blond was responsible for more than simply the engravings in Dezallier d'Argenville's seminal work on the principles of French formal garden design, La théorie et la pratique du jardinage, 1709: according to the well-informed connoisseur Pierre-Jean Mariette, chronicler of French artists, he laid out the structural "canvas" of the work and oversaw in detail its writing; the work was published anonymously, but in later editions Le Blond was credited with the text.

Named architecte du Roi, he made a set of presentation drawings, dated 1699, for the famous cascade and basin with its jet d'eau at royal Saint-Cloud constructed several hôtels particuliers in Paris, notably the hôtel de Clermont, rue de Varenne, and the hôtel de Vendôme, rue d'Enfer (today boulevard Saint-Michel).

As theoretician and illustrator of architecture, Le Blond produced the second (1710) and third (1720) editions of the Cours d'architecture de Vignole translated with commentary by Charles-Augustin d'Aviler, which Le Blond illustrated with his own drawings. These works introduced the distinctions between state apartments (appartements de parade) and private apartments (appartements de commodités) that would characterize French eighteenth-century planning, and he popularized the small chimneypieces that would take the place of the large ones in the Italian mode, popular in the previous century. He also provided illustrations for L’Histoire de l'abbaye de Saint-Denis (1706) by Michel Félibien.

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