A fine print depicting a fashionable group of people gathered in a Parisian pleasure garden.
In the foreground two noble-men peer and stare at the elegantly dressed lady who stands at the centre of the image. She is shown in full-length with her head turned in profile to the left. The woman wears an over-dress and a skirt of polonaise panels with deep bands of ruched adornments on the petticoat hem that ends above the ankle. The dress is finished with a low-cut ruched bust, and a pleated collar. Around her neck she wears a string of pearls with a bird ornament attached. The ringlets of her wig are shown under her large hat topped with plumes. She holds a handkerchief in one and with her fan in the other she screens her face from the gazing men. On the right an elderly woman stands in conversation with a gentleman. Further in the background men sit inside a circle of the formal garden’s tauperie. On the left another group of men and women face away in conversation.
In France, pleasure gardens were commonly called, in a Gallicism of “Vauxhall”, “Les Wauxhalls”. The French pleasure gardens were inspired by London’s most famous Vauxhall Gardens, established on the South Bank of the Thames in 1661. Vauxhall gardens was an 11 acre site that featured long alleys lined with avenues of trees and lit by lanterns. There was a raised pavilion for an orchestra, a rotunda where paintings were exhibited and walkways lined with booths.
The gardens were accessed by boat and were hugely popular amid the upper and middle classes of London. In his essay Vauxhall on the Boulevard: Pleasure Gardens in London and Paris, 1764-1784 Jonathan Conlin writes that, “Alongside the understandable attraction of escaping the humid confines of the city, much of the garden’s alfresco appeal lay in the unscripted entertainment afforded by the crowd itself: admission fees were low enough to admit members of both the noble elite as well as the middle class. In a society defined by rank, pleasure gardens were exciting, if occasionally unsettling, places to be.” (p.25, 2008)
“Les petits Waux-Halls” migrated across the channel when in 1764 the end of the Seven Years War sent a wave of Anglomania across France. Between 1764 and the Revolution at least 10 opened in Paris: one was opened by Jean Baptiste Torré on Boulevard Saint Martin in 1764, a “Wauxhall” was established at the Saint Gerain fair in 1768 and Piere Ruggieri opened another on Rue Saint Lazare – to name just a few. In a verse in praise of the charms of the Parisian Vauxhalls, The writer Anne-Marie du Bocage (1710-1802) lent her pen to their description:
In a word, under the same roof,
Mingling ranks and duties
This place charms with a hundred marvels
The eyes, the ears and the palate
Of the great, the small (people), and the middling (bourgeois).
This print depicts the Waux-hall as a place in which the display of fashion was a defining entertainment, and a place in which intrigue and amorous adventure were possible.
The etching was made by Pierre Alexandre Wille. A son of the engraver Jean George Wille, Pirre-Alexandre was introduced to art in his father’s studio and participated in most of the Parisian salons including the Salon de la Correspondence.
