The dairy at Rambouillet Castle

 

 

The building, designed under the supervision of the King’s Building Department and the Count of Angiviller – who was also governor of the Rambouillet estate – is a dairy built for pleasure or for the sake of propriety, commissioned by the King in 1785, a year after purchasing the estate from the Duke of Penthièvre. This type of building, conceived for the entertainment of an aristocracy drawn to rustic life, enjoyed a resurgence in popularity in the second half of the^18th century, reviving the taste of Catherine de’ Medici, who had a dairy built near Fontainebleau, but also that of Louis XIV, who had two further ‘laiteries de propreté’ built at the menagerie in Versailles, modelled on the famous dairy at Chantilly – now lost – which had been built for the Prince of Condé. 

Another dairy was built under Louis XV, for Madame de Pompadour at the Trianon menagerie, before a number of aristocrats became enamoured with the idea as the taste for English gardens developed. The finest example of these two trends was the ornamental dairy in the Queen’s Hamlet, designed by Richard Mique in 1785.  

 

 

 

 

The project was entrusted to Hubert Robert, the King’s garden designer since 1784, who was tasked with supervising the work. He called upon the architect Jacques-Jean Thévenin and the sculptor Pierre Julien, who created the sculptural group to be placed in a grotto, ‘Amalthea and Jupiter’s Goat’. Amalthea, Zeus’s foster mother, is sometimes depicted as a goat suckling the infant god in a cave on Crete, and at other times as a nymph giving him goat’s milk to drink. This group sculpture draws more closely on the account given by Ovid in his *Fasti*, which depicts a naiad to whom Zeus was entrusted as a child by Rhea. This famous nude, one of the finest of^{the eighteenth} century, plays not only on the classical austerity of the pose and the treatment of the nymph’s face, but also on the intense sensuality characteristic of the sculpture of that century, evident both in the flowing drapery and in the rendering of the goat’s fur. The treatment of the group thus fully echoes the duality of the site, which is at once classical and intensely mysterious, even animalistic, in its depths. The contrast between the white marble and the Vergelé stone of the grotto—which is more malleable than the sandstone originally chosen—further accentuates this effect.

 

 

 

 

Hubert Robert introduced a new aesthetic to the genre of the ‘lactarium’ (dairy for tasting) right down to the layout of the rooms. This neoclassical temple comprises two rooms lit exclusively by overhead light, one circular and the other rectangular. In Rambouillet, the milk preparation facility is situated in the cellars of the outbuildings belonging to the milk processing plant, allowing milk to be tasted in the first hall, whilst the second is dedicated to cooling.

The coffered rotunda in the first chamber is directly inspired by the Baths of Diocletian, whilst the vast rectangular chamber no longer houses a fountain but features artificial rocks framing two irregular basins. This design is reminiscent of Hubert Robert’s work at Versailles, where he had an artificial grotto built to house marble groups of horses sculpted by Girardon between 1778 and 1781, but also that of Méréville, working for the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde, the most accomplished example of a ‘new’—that is to say, English-style—garden.

This spectacular juxtaposition of the classical model and the natural inspiration drawn from England produces both a sense of wonder and a singular harmony. The blurring of the lines between nature and artifice, already at work during the Renaissance in the sculptural output of Bernard Palissy, finds here a refined expression which, moreover, integrates the depth of human time with the classical reference.

 

 

 

The furniture designed for this space is also new: in the first room, there is no traditional central marble table complementing the side tables, as is the case in other dairies. Instead, there is a solid mahogany table delivered in 1787 by Georges Jacob to Hubert Robert, accompanied by four pedestal tables and a whole set of chairs ‘of a new design in the Etruscan style, made of fine solid mahogany, based on Robert’s design’. A large tureen and six cups with their saucers, all made of porcelain, were delivered for this room in 1788.

The Queen’s Dairy was inaugurated in June 1787. Faced with such a tight deadline, the sculptor Julien – who was also tasked with creating two friezes and six medallions – enlisted the help of two other royal sculptors, Claude Dejoux and Jean-Joseph Foucou. His sculpted group, modelled in plaster and then sketched in marble from 1786 onwards, remains the work that defines the dairy. The artist is said to have wished to exhibit it in Paris at the 1787 Salon in order to receive praise for it, an honour which was denied him by the Count of Angiviller.

 

Annick Heitzmann, ‘The Rambouillet Dairy’, Versalia. Journal of the Society of Friends of Versailles, no. 10, 2007, pp. 46–57.

Hubert Robert and the Art of Garden Design, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Rmn, 2017.

Antoine Maës, Marie-Antoinette’s Dairy in Rambouillet: A Pastoral Temple for the Queen’s Pleasure, Paris , Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2016.