page_title: Huis ter Nieuwburg
section_title: Gardens
hierarchical_section_title: Huis ter Nieuwburg / Gardens
caption_attribution_description: Huis ter Nieuwburg in Rijswijk waar 1697 de Vrede van Rijswijk werd getekend
context_page_description: Huis ter Nieuwburg or Huis ter Nieuburch was a palace in Rijswijk, Holland, Dutch Republic. The symmetrical French Classicist building was probably designed by the Dutch architect Jacob van Campen together with Constantin Huygens and the prince himself. According to Slothouwer the designs were carried out by Arent van's Gravesande who was replaced by the French architect Simon de la Vallée in 1634. The palace was built between 1630 and 1636 for stadtholder Prince Frederick Henry.
  The palace with gardens was the country house of the Princes of Orange for years, and it was used for the peace negotiations resulting in the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697. After the death of Prince William III in 1702, the palace was inherited by the Kings of Prussia, until it was given back to the Princes of Orange by King Frederick II.
  The gardens of the palace were formal French Renaissance gardens constructed in 1636. In front of the palace were trees and parterres enclosed by walls. Behind the palace was a larger garden with four rectangular ponds.
  The building was demolished in 1790 after years of neglect. At present, the area is woodland known as the Rijswijkse Bos.
context_section_description: The geometric Late Renaissance gardens and ponds were constructed by 1636. They were carried out by André Mollet, son of the famous French garden architect Claude Mollet who served the French kings Henry IV and Louis XIII. They were illustrated as they had become fully developed and matured in Jan van Vianen's engraving after Petrus Schenck, which records the grand diplomatic gathering that led to the Treaty of Ryswick, signed in the house. The entire garden was surrounded by a rectangle of canals that drained the ground and formed the equivalent of a moat; around its inner banks allées of trees isolated the pleasure grounds from the featureless agricultural landscape outside.
  Entry was across one of three bridges and through a formal woodland or bocage, through which three drives were pierced: the central one led through a free-standing Doric portal—guarded by sentry-boxes on this occasion—that was centred on a pedimented central gate in the mock-battlemented wall that enclosed the paved and cobbled forecourt. Right and left of this axial entrance, reserved during the treaty negotiations for the Mediator, were matching unemphasised entrances—perhaps opened in the walling for the occasion—destined, as the engraving's legend specifies, for the French representatives on the right and for those of the Allies on the left; clearly, this will have avoided tense protocol confrontations over which coach would enter the cour d'honneur first.
  The north front of the Huis with its paired corner pavilions was separated from the forecourt by a low balustraded terrace that created a privileged zone that protected the parade rooms from the immediate clatter of the courtyard and the inconvenient leavings of horses. For the duration of the negotiations, temporary brick walls had been erected to divide the entrance court from its flanking parterre gardens; in ordinary times, openings in the terrace balustrade and a few steps gave direct access to these gardens, where fruit trees were espaliered against the brick walls.
  The central axis continued through the central rooms of the corps de logis and was extended as a wide gravelled walk down the axis of the pleasure grounds, which it divided symmetrically on either side; at the far end, the enclosing narrow band of trees drew back in a semi-circular exedra that parted at the center to afford a view of the church steeple of Delft on the horizon, centred on the garden axis.
  The grounds thus enclosed and divided featured a symmetrical suite of six parterres that were planted—rather than with the clipped patterns relieved with colored gravel of Le Nôtre's Garden à la française manner—as formal bosquets of trees laid out quincunx-fashion and separated by wide gravelled walks. In the four outer corners of the grounds that were articulated by these shady sections were four rectangular ponds, the vijvers of which two survive today. At the outside front corners were a pair of mock fortifications with corner bastions all in tightly-clipped evergreens, entered by arched doorways.
  Two separate gardens enclosed by brick walls extended east and west of the end pavilions. The eastward one was planted with evergreens surrounding a circular central rockwork fountain, from which is derived its name De Rots, "The Rockery". The westward one was the De Meloen Tuin, the melon garden.
caption: The palace and gardens during the negotiations of the Treaty of Ryswick in 1697, engraved by Jan van Vianen after P. Schenck
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