Jardins des Lumières, 1750-1800

Exhibition at the Grand Trianon, Domaine du château de Versailles, 5 May – 27 September 2026

“To bring together all times and all places in a single garden” Carmontelle

Created for Marie-Antoinette, the English garden at the Petit Trianon, blending refinement and exoticism, offered a striking contrast to the French formal gardens of Versailles: a perfect illustration of the veritable craze for gardens that swept across the whole of Europe from 1750 onwards.

Among the most marvellous were Kew Gardens and Stowe in England,  the gardens of Schwetzingen Palace, residence of the Elector Palatine, in Germany, those of Laeken, home of the Saxe-Coburgs, in the Netherlands, the designs and creations of Gustav III, the ‘Lord Gardener’, for his residences at Haga and Drottningholm in Sweden, the English gardens of Tsarskoye Selo and Pavlovsk for Empress Catherine and later Tsar Paul I; in France, Parc Monceau, the Désert de Retz, Ermenonville and Méréville, where the painter Hubert Robert worked.

Through 250 examples of paintings, drawings, furniture, garden architecture, costumes, rare books and photographs, this exhibition catalogue highlights the variety of these gardens with their irregular layouts and often eccentric features, where philosophical or Masonic themes rub shoulders with the most fanciful exoticism, garden microcosms and encyclopaedic works whose scope touches on the universal, reflections of the world and the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment.