Claude Nicolas Ledoux

Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (21 March 1736 – 18 November 1806) was a French architect and an early figure in French Neoclassical architecture. He applied architectural theory to both private buildings and urban planning, and his unrealized plan for the Ideal City of Chaux earned him a reputation as a utopian. However, his major projects were paid for by the French monarchy, and they were later seen as emblems of the ancien régime rather than of a perfect society. The French Revolution cut his career short, and much of his work was torn down during the 1800s.

Publications

In 1804, he published a book of his designs, L'Architecture considérée sous le rapport de l'art, des mœurs et de la législation, where he reworked his earlier plans to make them more strictly neoclassical and current. This later revision has made it hard to judge his true role in the development of Neoclassical architecture. His most ambitious project was the unfinished Royal Saltworks at Arc-et-Senans, a visionary town full of examples of architecture parlante. He also designed more ordinary structures, like about sixty elaborate tollhouses around Paris for the Wall of the General Tax Farm.

Biography

Ledoux was born in 1736 in Dormans-sur-Marne, the son of a modest merchant from Champagne. His mother, Françoise Domino, and godmother, Françoise Piloy, encouraged his drawing skills early on. Later, the Abbey of Sassenage paid for his studies in Paris at the Collège de Beauvais from 1749 to 1753, where he studied Classics. At seventeen, he left school and worked as an engraver, but four years later he started studying architecture under Jacques-François Blondel, whom he respected for life.

He then trained with Pierre Contant d’Ivry and met Jean-Michel Chevotet. Both of these well-known Parisian architects worked in the restrained French Rococo style, called the “Louis XV style,” as well as the early Neoclassical “Goût grec” (Greek taste). Through them, Ledoux was introduced to Classical architecture, especially the temples of Paestum and the works of Palladio, which greatly influenced him.

His teachers introduced Ledoux to their wealthy clients. One of his first patrons was Baron Crozat de Thiers, a very rich connoisseur who hired him to remodel part of his grand townhouse in the Place Vendôme. Another client from his teachers was Président Hocquart de Montfermeil and his sister, Mme de Montesquiou.

Early work (1762–1770)

In 1762, the young Ledoux was hired to redecorate the Café Godeau on the rue Saint-Honoré. He created an interior with trompe-l’œil and mirrors, featuring painted pilasters on the walls mixed with pier glasses and panels decorated with trophies of helmets and weapons, all done in bold detail. In 1969, this interior was moved to the Musée Carnavalet. The next year, the Marquis de Montesquiou-Fézensac asked Ledoux to redesign the old hilltop château on his estate at Mauperthuis.

Ledoux rebuilt the château and laid out new gardens with fountains fed by an aqueduct. He also built an orangery, a pheasantry, and large outbuildings in the gardens and park, though little remains today. In 1764, he designed a Palladian house on the Chaussée d’Antin for Président Hocquart, using the colossal order—a motif he often employed, even though strict French tradition preferred stacking column orders from simplest to most complex: Tuscan, Doric, Ionic, Corinthian.

On 26 July 1764, Ledoux married Marie Bureau, the daughter of a court musician, at the Saint-Eustache Church in Paris. A friend from Champagne, Joseph Marin Masson de Courcelles, got him a job as architect for the Water and Forestry Department. From 1764 to 1770, he worked on renovating and designing churches, bridges, wells, fountains, and schools. Still standing from this period are the bridge of Marac, the Prégibert bridge in Rolampont, the churches of Fouvent-le-Haut, Roche-et-Raucourt, and Rolampont, the nave and portal of Cruzy-le-Châtel, and the choir of Saint-Etienne d’Auxerre.

In 1766, Ledoux began designing the Hôtel d’Hallwyll in Le Marais, Paris. According to the Dijon architect Jacques Cellerier, this building received wide praise and brought Ledoux new clients. The owner, Franz-Joseph d’Hallwyll, a Swiss colonel, and his wife, Marie-Thérèse Demidorge, wanted the work done cheaply, so Ledoux reused parts of the existing building, the former Hôtel de Bouligneux. He had planned two Doric colonnades leading to a nymphaeum decorated with urns at the garden’s end, but the site’s limits made that impossible.

Instead, he painted a trompe-l’œil colonnade on the blind wall of the neighboring convent to extend the view. The success of the modest Hôtel d’Hallwyll led in 1767 to a more important commission, the Hôtel d’Uzès on the rue Montmartre. There too, Ledoux kept the structure of an earlier building. The paneling from the salon, an early neoclassical work carved by Joseph Métivier and Jean-Baptist Boiston from Ledoux’s designs, is now preserved in the Carnavalet Museum in Paris.