Louis Carrogis Carmontelle

• 1. Introduction

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  Louis Carrogis Carmontelle was a man who could not be contained by a single art form. Born on the 15th of August 1717 in Paris, the son of a bootmaker, he spent his life moving between worlds that rarely overlapped: the theatre, the garden, the portrait studio, and the inventor's workbench. He designed one of the most celebrated French landscape gardens of his era. He invented a new theatrical genre. He drew a portrait of the infant Mozart at the clavier. And in the last years of a very long life, he built a machine that rolled painted landscapes past a backlit window, giving viewers the illusion of strolling through a garden. That machine was a distant ancestor of cinema. Who was this man? How did the son of a bootmaker end up teaching drawing to the future King of France? And what drove him, well into old age, to keep inventing new ways for people to experience the world?

• 2. From Bootmaker's Son to Court Servant

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  Carmontelle studied drawing and geometry from an early age, and by twenty three he had qualified for the title of engineer. That credential opened a door: a position in the household of the Duc de Chevreuse and the Duc de Luynes at the Chateau de Dampierre, where he taught drawing and mathematics to the children of the house.

  In 1758 a second appointment followed, this time under the Comte Pons de Saint-Maurice, who served as governor to the Duc de Chartres and commanded the regiment of Orleans-dragons. Carmontelle's official role was that of topographical engineer, but alongside his drawing duties he was already writing farces and tales. The combination of technical precision and theatrical imagination would define the rest of his career.

  After 1763 he moved into the household of Louis Philippe I, Duke of Orleans, as a lecteur, a reader whose job was to provide theatrical entertainment for the family. He wrote and directed plays. He designed the scenery. He made the costumes. Out of this sustained creative labor grew a new genre that he could claim as his own invention: the proverbe dramatique, a short scene of light comedy designed not to conclude on its own but to serve as a springboard for theatrical improvisation by the audience or performers. He also wrote plays for Marie-Madeleine Guimard, the famous ballerina, staged at the private theatre of her residence at Pantin.

• 3. Portraits and the Infant Mozart

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  Alongside his theatrical work, Carmontelle built a reputation as a portraitist of a very particular kind. Working in pen and watercolor, he could complete a likeness of a notable person in under two hours. The speed was part of the method: the results were vivid and alive in a way that long formal sittings rarely produced.

  The most celebrated of these drawings is a portrait of the infant Mozart playing the clavier. Mozart's presence in the French capital in the early 1760s drew considerable attention, and Carmontelle captured him at the keyboard with the same practiced economy he brought to every sitting. That single image has done more than almost anything else to keep Carmontelle's name in circulation across the centuries since his death.

  The breadth of his subjects reflects the social world he moved through: a man of modest origins who spent decades inside aristocratic households, meeting the notable people who passed through those circles and committing their faces to paper in the time it took to drink a cup of tea.

• 4. A Garden Out of Time

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  In 1773, the Duc de Chartres, son of Louis-Philippe d'Orleans and the man who would later be known as Philippe Egalite, asked Carmontelle to design a garden around a small house he was building to the northwest of Paris. What Carmontelle created over the next five years became known as the folie de Chartres, and it survives today as Parc Monceau.

  The garden was a deliberate departure from the naturalistic English landscape gardens that were fashionable at the time. Carmontelle's design was organized around a series of fabriques, architectural structures meant to represent every style and era known to the eighteenth century: antiquity, exoticism, Chinese, Turkish, ruins, tombs, and rustic landscapes. The animating idea, captured in the phrase he used for the project, was to unite in one garden all places and all times.

  A visitor walking through the folie de Chartres moved not through a single coherent landscape but through a sequence of surprises, each scene designed to astonish before giving way to the next. After the death of the Duc d'Orleans in 1785, Carmontelle entered the service of the Duc de Chartres, and in that capacity taught drawing to the duc's son, Louis-Philippe of France, the future last King of France, and to his sister Adelaide.

• 5. The Ancestor of Cinema

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  In 1783, Carmontelle began work on what he called decors transparents animes, or animated transparent scenery. The materials were simple: long bands of paper, fifty centimeters high and as many as forty two meters long, painted with landscape scenes. Each band was mounted on two wooden rollers inside a box. Daylight entered the box from behind, passing through the translucent paper, and as the rollers turned, the landscape appeared to move.

  The effect was of a slow walk through a painted garden, the scenery unwinding at a pace the operator could control. Among the first subjects Carmontelle chose were Landscapes of France, English Gardens, The Seasons, and The Banks of the Seine. One of these moving landscapes survives at the Museum of Sceaux.

  The device anticipated the magic lantern and, more distantly, the motion picture, not in its technology but in its fundamental ambition: to give a static viewer the sensation of moving through space. Carmontelle died in Paris on the 26th of December 1806, at eighty nine, and the landscape still rolling at Sceaux remains the most tangible trace of his restless last invention.