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Latest WatercolorsPresented here is a selection of our most recent work; the dimensions cited indicate the size of each mat opening, or "window." Please e-mail us for further information about a particular watercolor.Top left: The Archives Pavilion at St-Cyr. This small limestone pavilion, of truly exceptional beauty, was built in the mid-18th century at the entrance to the Maison royale de Saint-Louis, known simply as Saint-Cyr, the vast convent school that stood a bare stone's throw from Versailles. Louis XIV established St-Cyr in 1684 as a pension to educate impoverished aristocratic girls at the behest of Madame de Maintenon, his pious morganatic wife, and the imposing complex was the work of Jules Hardouin-Mansart, the Sun King's ubiquitous First Architect. Though it is a perfect jewel—the apex of the pavillon de plaisance form and the distillation of French neoclassicism—nevertheless the pavilion remains virtually unknown and has rarely been published in the architectural literature, and even then as a footnote. Had it been erected within Versailles' walls rather than in St-Cyr's shadow, the pavilion would today be mentioned in the same breath as Gabriel's masterwork, the Petit Trianon; instead it stands overlooked and anonymous, mere yards from the main road linking the towns of St-Cyr and Versailles. Our blog post contains further information about the pavilion. (15" x 20") Second left: A Louis XIV-era reservoir built on the market square of the St-Louis quarter of the town of Versailles. This elegantly rusticated cubic pavilion has been recently restored and echoes the architectural vocabulary of the Château de Versailles’ orangerie, particularly its bravura stereotomy, or stone-cutting. (11" square) Bottom left: One of a pair of guard pavilions surviving at Blérancourt, a seventeenth-century estate near Compiègne, the work of the architect Solomon de Brosse, which, sadly, has lost its château. This early baroque pavilion is beautifully detailed with fine stonework ornamental carving, but its most dinstinctive feature is its sinuously curved slate roof, punctuated by four demi-lune œil de bœuf dormer windows. (19" x 14") Top right: The Apiarist’s House at Schönbusch, an unrealized project for a provincial estate in northern Bavaria. This charming rococo design, with its tented Turkish roof and stucco-work palm pilasters, was the work of the architect E.J. von Herrigoyen, who designed a number of pavilions still standing in the estate’s extensive landscape park. (17" x 20") Second right: The Rotunda at Poltow, a fantasy design in the late eighteenth-century neoclassical "concours" style. Concours were architectural competitions held at the École de Beaux-arts in which students were given 24 hours to design and render a building following a written program. In the late eighteenth century, a grandiose neoclassicism developed at the school and found its most powerful expression in the bravura renderings of these fantasy exercises. (19" x 27") Bottom right: The Memorial Bridge at Poltow, a fantasy design in an Adamesque neoclassical style. (14" x 18") |
  
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