page_title: Claude Desgots
section_title: Later career
hierarchical_section_title: Claude Desgots / Later career
caption_attribution_description: English: Plate 1. General plan of the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris. From Architecture françoise, Tome 3, Livre 5, Chapitre 9 (following p. 44 of the 1904 reimpression). For the original French text discussing this plate, see p. 38 of tome 3 (at Gallica).
context_page_description: Claude Desgots was a French architect and landscape architect, who designed French formal gardens in France and England. He worked with and was strongly influenced by André Le Nôtre, the designer of the gardens at Vaux-le-Vicomte and Versailles that set the pattern for grand gardening in France up to the Revolution. In spite of increasing competition from the informal English landscape style, the French tradition was kept vital through apprenticeship connections in the generation following Le Nôtre's death in 1700, and a principal representative in this tradition was Claude Desgots, "a worthy heir and a great talent in gardening", remarked the master teacher of architecture Jacques-François Blondel.
context_section_description: When William Bentinck, 1st Earl of Portland was ambassador to Paris in 1698, he convinced Desgots to return with him to England, where Desgots worked out plans for the Queen's House, Greenwich, and parterres for Windsor Castle, in part bringing up to date earlier plans made by Le Nôtre. Nothing came of the English adventure, except that William III of England, who was also Stadthouder in the Netherlands, commissioned him to draw up plans for the gardens at Het Loo, which have recently been replanted to Desgots' designs.
  Back in France once more, he was appointed Designer of the parterres of the Royal Houses and Controller of the King's Works, doubtless due to the family connection. He was employed by Phillipe II, duc d'Orléans, the Regent during Louis XV's minority, for whom his design at the Palais Royal introduced smooth hillocks with clipped designs of palmettes, which became a familiar feature of formal French pattern-gardens in the eighteenth century.
  Desgots took on as a pupil, c. 1720-25, the Swedish architect and garden designer Carl Hårleman, the close collaborator and correspondent of Carl Gustav Tessin. Hårleman was the prime mover in perpetuating the French formal garden in eighteenth-century Sweden.
  In 1730 Desgots published a short biography of André Le Nôtre, which is an important source of information about his mentor.
caption: Plan of the Palais-Royal gardens as designed by Claude Desgots (from Blondel's Architecture françoise, 1754)
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