The Shell Cottage

Three structures were built within the English garden at Rambouillet, which was laid out from 1779 onwards by the Duke of Penthièvre, son of the Count of Toulouse, who had since become the owner of the estate: a Chinese pavilion built over a grotto, a thatched cottage situated in the centre of an island, and a rustic hermitage erected on top of a hill.

Originally, this small structure was a gift intended for the Princess of Lamballe, who had been the Queen’s lady-in-waiting since 1774. Married to Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, a notorious libertine, she found herself a widow and childless before she had even turned twenty. Her father-in-law, the Duke of Penthièvre, spent much of the year at Rambouillet, as did his daughter-in-law. It was for her enjoyment that, in 1779, he commissioned the architect Jean-Baptiste Paindebled to build this thatched cottage adorned with seashells, which was completed in 1781. This building predates the Queen’s Hamlet at Versailles by a few years, but was already part of the well-established trend for pastoral or rustic architecture within royal and aristocratic estates, such as at Chantilly (1774–1775) or Bellevue (1781).

The surprise created by this thatched cottage lies in the stark contrast with its interior décor, which is lined with pearly Dieppe shells, Seine shells, mussels and even shells from the West Indies. The project specifications indicate that 800,000 shells were collected, of which nearly 170,000 were retained after sorting and grading, along with one and a half tonnes of mother-of-pearl and blue glass.

This type of décor is not in itself an architectural novelty: as far back as antiquity, shrines dedicated to nymphs were lined with shells. These nymphaea took the form of grottoes and generally housed a hydraulic structure, providing a cool place in summer. These grottoes, adorned with shells, were revived in both Italy and France during the Renaissance. However, it was in the^17th century that the trend really flourished in France, as evidenced by numerous examples (in Issy-les-Moulineaux for Marguerite de France, at the Château de Maisons, in Gerbéviller, etc.). In 1676, the tiered seating in the grove of the Ballroom and the interior of the Grotto of Thetis at Versailles were entirely adorned with shells. But of all the Rocaille-style grottos, the Shell Grotto in Kent is both the most famous and the most mysterious in the world, as it has proved impossible to date it.

Since the^17th century, the European elite in Amsterdam, London and Madrid have been fascinated by exotic shells from distant warm seas, brought back by the ships of the Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602. The rarest shells became luxury items; they were carved, gilded and painted, and were used to decorate the furnishings of mansions throughout Europe. The new Sanssouci Palace, built in the^mid-18th century in Potsdam for Frederick II, King of Prussia, is one of the most famous examples of this. The décor of the Grotto Room, attributed to Carl von Gontard, is inlaid with shells, stones, marble, quartz and semi-precious stones.

Whilst Jacques-Germain Soufflot had already built a nymphaeum in Chatou, completed in 1777, the design at Rambouillet is unique in that it is set within a thatched cottage and contains no hydraulic features. It is not a place of refreshment, but a place of luxury that also evokes the naturalist passion of^18th-century enthusiasts. Admittedly, the shell was already an omnipresent motif of the so-called Rococo period in the decorative arts, the ornamental vocabulary was considerably enriched by the development of shell collections and publications in the field of conchology, a branch of natural history that many enthusiasts were passionate about in^{the 18th century}. Antoine Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville was one such enthusiast, author of *La Conchyliologie ou Histoire naturelle des coquilles* ( 1757), which highlights the appeal of this type of collection as being both instructive and pleasing to the eye.

Indeed, it all comes down to the arrangement of the specimens, as demonstrated by the plates in the *Locupletissimi rerum naturalium thesauri* ( 1734–1765) by Albertus d’Albertus Seba and Frederik Ruysch. Within the drawers of shell cabinets, shells were already displayed as ornaments. This was also the case with the famous collection of Simon Schijnvoet in Amsterdam, and that of Joseph Bonnier de la Mosson, a wealthy financier and court banker in Paris. At the public auction of his collection in 1744, a catalogue was drawn up by the dealer Edme-François Gersaint. A true pioneer, Gersaint transformed the shell art market by developing the system of public auctions with a catalogue raisonné in Paris, based on a model from Amsterdam, a major European import centre. As early as 1736, Gersaint produced the catalogue for the first public sale of shells in Paris, featuring ‘Observations on Shells’ which enabled collectors to learn how to select shells and display them in accordance with established conventions.

The shell became the matrix for the infinite variety of the volute, magnified by Piranesi in his collection *Cammini* (1769). It was thus linked to the classical tradition that inspired the entire second half of the^18th century. The décor of the seashell cottage should be appreciated not only in relation to the rocaille grottoes of^{the 16th} and^17th centuries, but also within a wider cultural context blending naturalist fervour and Piranesian creative reverie. The shell is at once an object of knowledge, an ornament and a source of inspiration, as Anne Vallayer-Coster’s Still Life with Shells so brilliantly demonstrates.

This exquisite and fragile décor, which was partly destroyed during the^19th century, combining shells, mother-of-pearl and glass paste within a thatched cottage, is one of the most valuable testimonies to the evolution of taste in the second half of the^18th century. The ensemble is complemented by a set of furniture crafted by François II Foliot in 1780, featuring shell-shaped seats and legs carved in the shape of reeds, all painted ‘au naturel’, that is to say, in polychrome.

Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, *Natural History Elucidated in One of its Principal Parts: Conchylology, which deals with shells, augmented by zoomorphosis*, Paris, De Bure l’aîné, vol. 1, 1757.

Antoine-Joseph Dezallier d’Argenville, *Natural History Elucidated in One of Its Principal Parts: Conchyliology, which deals with shells*, 2 vols. , Paris, De Bure l’aîné, 1742.

Edme-François Gersaint, Catalogue raisonné de coquilles et autres curiosités naturelles . Paris: Flahaut and Prault fils.

Charlotte Guichard, ‘The shell in the^18th century: a border object?’,*Techniques & Culture*, 59, 2012, 150–163.

Antoine Maës, *La Chaumière aux coquillages de Rambouillet. The Making of Illusion in the 18th Century*, Montreuil, Gourcuff Gradenigo, 2018.