THE SENTIMENTAL TRAVERSE OF CLAUDE-HENRI WATELET’S EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PICTURESQUE GARDEN ISLE, THE MOULIN JOLY

The Sentimental Traverse of Claude-Henri Watelet’s Eighteenth-Century Picturesque Garden Isle, the Moulin Joly. Claude-Henri Watelet’s 1774 Essai sur les jardins (Essay on Gardens) was the first French garden treatise to enter the picturesque garden debate, set into motion in England with the 1748 publication of William Gilpin’s A Dialogue Upon the Gardens […] at Stow, a dialogic garden tour which delineated the aesthetic principles of the picturesque, advancing a formalist approach to the visual apprehension of the landscape. Watelet’s Essay on Gardens, however, exemplified the affective development of the garden treatise in the second half of the eighteenth century, which featured a textual, oftentimes sentimental traverse of the picturesque landscape, evoking a sensation-imbued garden walk, or in this case, ferry crossing. Watelet’s Essay describes the new domain of landscape architecture as inhabited by artists, poets, and designers, or décorateurs, who conceived gardens as pictures, and the garden walk as a series of volatile, shifting tableaux. The picturesque garden ramble, vivified in Watelet’s ekphrastic prose, could thereafter be traversed and re-traversed by the reader regardless of their location in space-time. In Essai sur les jardins, Watelet crosses the Seine by boat, en route to Paris, when he serendipitously discovers his future garden isle, the Moulin Joly. Watelet’s gaze errs along the otherworldly pastorale, seizing upon what would become his future ferme ornée, or embellished farm, catching sight of its flowing waters and verdant groves, fortuitously up for sale. This fleeting glimpse, or coup d’œil, in which the fugitive tableau is instantaneously imprinted onto the retina, enabled the garden visitor an immediate entrée into the terrain of the subconscious, embarking upon an ever-changing traverse of the emotions suggested by the imagery, symbolism, and vocabulary of the landscape garden.