Antoine Meunier (Paris 1765-1808 Nîmes)

These views capture the eighteenth-century splendor of the park of Saint-Cloud before its partial destruction in 1870. The drawings served as models for prints in an ambitious description of France by various authors, published in Paris between 1784 and 1792 under the title Voyage pittoresque de la France, to which the draughtsman, Antoine Meunier, contributed numerous views. The first drawing records the château proper, shortly after it was acquired for Queen Marie-Antoinette, and transformed by the architect Richard Mique (see Austin Montenay, op. cit., pp. 90-111). The second view shows the famous Grande Cascade, still preserved and built in the 1660s as part of the garden design by André Le Notre. Marie-Antoinette had opened the park and even the château, and they drew a large and elegant public which came to ‘to see the waterworks and l’Autrichienne’, i.e. the Queen (ibid., p. 90).