Palace of Fontainebleau

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 1st of March 2015, at about six in the morning, professional thieves broke into the Chinese Museum of the Palace of Fontainebleau. The château stands 55 km southeast of Paris and ranks among the largest French royal châteaux. Alarms were ringing and video cameras were recording. The thieves still needed only seven minutes to take about fifteen of the most valuable objects in the collection. The haul included a replica of the crown of Siam, a Tibetan mandala and an enamel chimera from the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. An Asian collection inside a French forest residence raises questions. Why did French kings keep coming back to this spot, even though they stayed only a few months each year? Who filled its rooms with painting and sculpture, and how did their style travel across Europe? What happened to the palace when emperors, armies and republics took their turns inside it? And how did a royal retreat in the forest become a place the whole world protects?

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• 2. Spring and Keep

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  A natural spring in what is now the English garden gave Fontainebleau its name, from the Fontaine Belle-Eau, or beautiful water. In 1622 the writer Henry Peacham said it "is the purest and fairest fountaine esteemed in the world, wherefore it was called Belle eauë."

  The earliest written reference to a royal residence here dates to 1137, under King Louis VII the Younger. The lodge probably stood earlier, perhaps under Philip I, who reigned from 1060 to 1108, when the Gâtinais region was annexed from the Duchy of Burgundy. Kings favored it as an autumn base because the surrounding forest held abundant game and many springs.

  The first château was a square donjon, a fortified tower ringed by a wall. It rose three stories and covered about fifty square meters. Its stone walls were three meters thick at the base and a meter thick higher up. Windows faced north and south, and a wooden palisade crowned the top. The king lived on the middle level.

  In 1169 the priest Thomas Becket consecrated a chapel that Louis VII had built. Becket was living in exile in France because of his quarrels with King Henry II of England. Louis also sponsored a monastery of the Trinitarians, a mendicant order of monks, close to the castle. Those monks would one day sell land to a king with far grander plans.

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• 3. Francis I and the Italians

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  Francis I, who lived from 1494 to 1547, was not content with a modest medieval castle. He hired the architect Gilles Le Breton to build a new palace in the Renaissance style. Le Breton created the Cour Ovale, or oval courtyard, and left the old keep standing along one side. He added the Porte Dorée, the Golden Gate, as the Italian-style main entrance. On the north side he built the Portique de Serlio, whose Renaissance stairway led up to the royal apartments.

  About 1528 Francis began the Galerie François I, a passage that let him walk from his apartments straight to the chapel of the Trinitarians. In 1531 he made it part of his royal apartments. He brought the architect Sebastiano Serlio from Italy. Between 1533 and 1539 the Florentine painter Rosso Fiorentino filled the walls with murals glorifying the king, framed in high-relief stucco. The mythological scenes illustrate the king's virtues, with titles such as Ignorance Driven Out, The Royal Elephant and The Education of Achilles.

  The furniture maker Francesco Scibec da Carpi built the lower walls, which carry the coat of arms of France. Beside each painting Francis commissioned sits his personal emblem, a salamander surrounded by flames. Francesco Primaticcio of Bologna, whom the French called Primatice, joined the decoration later.

  About 1540 Francis began a new square of buildings around a large courtyard, on land bought from the Trinitarians. The wing of the Ministers closed it on the north and the wing of Ferrare on the east. On the south stood a wing with the Gallery of Ulysses, where Primaticcio painted more monumental murals. The château also received a park in the Italian Renaissance style with pavilions and the first grotto in France. Four statues of Atlas still decorate that grotto, the only surviving piece of Francis's original gardens.

  The blend of painting and sculpture that these artists created became known as the first School of Fontainebleau. It lasted from about 1530 until about 1610 and helped form the French version of Northern Mannerism. Rosso had lost most of his possessions in the Sack of Rome in 1527, and Francis invited him to France in 1531. Primaticcio joined him in 1532. Rosso died in France in 1540. In 1552, on Primaticcio's advice, Henry II invited Niccolò dell'Abbate of Modena.

  The school favored stucco moldings and frescoes, along with mysterious allegories drawn from mythology. Grotesques, strapwork and putti appear everywhere, and so does a certain eroticism. The figures echo Michelangelo, Raphael and especially Parmigianino. Ideal women have small neat heads on long necks and exaggeratedly long torsos and limbs. Primaticcio was also told to copy antique Roman statues for the king, which spread classical sculpture through France.

  Etchings of the group's paintings were apparently made first at Fontainebleau itself and later in Paris. These prints carried the style to Antwerp, to Germany and eventually to London. They also preserve several paintings that no longer exist.

  From 1584 to 1594, during the Wars of Religion, work inside the palace stopped. When Henry IV took the throne he hired Ambroise Dubois of Antwerp and the Parisians Toussaint Dubreuil and Martin Fréminet. Historians sometimes call them the second school. Their late Mannerist paintings used elongated, undulating forms and crowded compositions. They drew on scenes from the Italian poet Torquato Tasso and the ancient Greek novelist Heliodorus of Emesa.

  The French artists who worked beside the Italians absorbed the style. They included the painter Jean Cousin the Elder and the sculptors Jean Goujon and Germain Pilon. Many works by both schools were lost when parts of the château were remodelled.

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• 4. Ballroom and Moat

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  The letter H, the initial of Henry II, appears all through the ballroom of Fontainebleau, alongside crescent moons. The moon was the symbol of his mistress, Diane de Poitiers. Francis I had begun the space as an open loggia. Around 1552 Henry closed it with high windows and an ornate coffered ceiling and made it a room for balls.

  From 1552 Niccolò dell'Abate painted the walls and pillars, following drawings by Primaticcio. The scenes include The Feast of Bacchus, Apollo and the Muses on Mount Parnassus, and The Three Graces dancing before the gods. One fresco is far more local. It shows Sébastien de Rabutin, a court usher who killed a wolf in 1548 during a hunt in the forest of Orléans. Henry II commissioned the painting to mark the event. A gallery above the eastern end held the musicians, and the monumental fireplace is flanked by satyrs that Primaticcio copied from Roman originals. The room was also the birthplace of Henry's firstborn son, Francis II.

  A horseshoe-shaped staircase on the east wing of the lower court dates from the same reign, designed by the architects Philibert de l'Orme and Jean Bullant. It was later enlarged and became a symbol of the château.

  Henry II died in a jousting accident. His widow, Catherine de' Medici, took over the project and carried it through the reigns of her three sons, Francis II, Charles IX and Henry III. She named Primaticcio superintendent of royal public works. He designed the wing of the Belle Cheminée, noted for its elaborate chimneys and two opposing stairways. In 1565, as a security measure during the Wars of Religion, she had a moat dug around the château.

  Henry IV added more to Fontainebleau than any king since Francis I. He extended the oval court westward with two pavilions, called Tiber and Luxembourg. Between 1601 and 1606 he remade all the façades around the courtyard, including that of the chapel of Saint-Saturnin. On the east he built a domed gateway, the Porte du Baptistère. Between 1606 and 1609 he built the Cour des Offices, which held the kitchens and housing for court officials.

  Two more galleries, the Gallery of Diana and the Gallery of Deer, enclosed the old garden of Diana. The Gallery of Diana was eighty meters long and served as a promenade for the Queen. Henry's last addition was a jeu de paume, an indoor tennis court, the largest of its kind existing anywhere in the world.

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• 5. Gardens and Carp

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  The large pond beside the château covers four hectares, and Henry IV first stocked it with carp. Courtiers used it for boating parties, and it supplied fish for the table. Seventeenth-century descriptions tell of guests feeding carp that grew enormous and were said to be a hundred years old. A small octagonal house on an island in the center, the Pavillon de l'Étang, was added under Louis XIV. Napoleon I rebuilt it and decorated it with his initial.

  Between 1606 and 1609 Henry also built a grand canal 1200 meters long. That was sixty years before Louis XIV built his own grand canal at Versailles. On the south side Henry laid out a park planted with pines, elms and fruit trees. His gardener Claude Mollet, trained at the Château d'Anet, made a large parterre of flower beds with ancient statues.

  Between 1660 and 1664 Louis XIV's chief gardener André Le Nôtre worked with Louis Le Vau to rebuild that parterre on a grander scale. They filled it with geometric designs and boxwood-bordered paths, and added a basin called Les Cascades at the head of the canal. Le Nôtre also planted shade trees along the canal and a wide elm-lined path beside it. After Louis XIV's reign his fountains were removed.

  The Garden of Diana was the private garden of the king and queen, visible from their windows. Its fountain was made by the Italian fountain-maker Tommaso Francini, who also worked on the Medici Fountain in the Jardin du Luxembourg. The bronze statue of Diana with a young deer is a copy made by the Keller brothers in 1684 for the royal residence at Marly. It copies the Diana of Versailles, an antique Roman statue that a pope gave to Henry IV and that now hangs in the Louvre. The fountain's original statue, by Barthélemy Prieur in 1602, stands inside the Gallery of Deer. The garden opened to the public under the Third Republic.

  Under Napoleon I the royal landscape architect Maximilien Joseph Hurtault turned the former Pine Garden into an English park. He planted catalpa, tulip trees, sophora and cypress trees from Louisiana, and added a stream and antique boulders. Bronze copies of the Borghese Gladiator and the Dying Gaul stand there. A path leads through a curtain of trees to the Belle-Eau spring itself, rebuilt with an octagonal basin in 1891. In the 1980s a group of statues of mythical figures, entirely unrelated to the château's history, was placed around it to bring in contemporary art.

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• 6. Guests and Queens

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  On the 10th of November 1657, a murder took place inside Fontainebleau. Queen Christina of Sweden, who had just abdicated her crown, was a guest of Louis XIV. She suspected her Master of the Horse and reputed lover, the Marchese, of betraying her secrets to her enemies. Her servants chased him through the halls and stabbed him to death. Louis came to see her, never mentioned the killing, and let her continue her travels. Louis spent more days at Fontainebleau than any other monarch, hunting there each year at the end of summer and the start of autumn.

  On the 19th and the 20th of May 1717, the Russian Tsar Peter the Great visited during the Regency. The court organized a stag hunt and a banquet, and officially the visit was a success. Later memoirs by members of his delegation tell a different story. Peter disliked the French style of hunting and thought the château too small. He preferred beer to wine and brought his own supply, and he liked to rise early, unlike the French court.

  On the 5th of September 1725 the chapel of the Trinity hosted the wedding of Louis XV and Marie Leszczyńska. Louis XV had so many courtiers that he built a new courtyard in 1737-38 just to house them. Between 1750 and 1754 the architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel built a new wing with lavish apartments for the king and queen.

  Marie Antoinette's rooms show how fragile that world was. In 1786 she received a boudoir that gave her a measure of privacy. It is the best surviving example of the decorative style just before the Revolution, with arabesques and cameos on a silver background. She and Louis XVI made their last visit to Fontainebleau that same year. Her bed for the queen's bedchamber did not arrive until 1797, after the Revolution and her execution. Because of that delay it escaped the auctions that sold off the château's furniture, and Napoleon's wives, Joséphine and Marie-Louise, slept in it instead.

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• 7. Napoleon's Palace

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  In 1804 Pope Pius VII travelled from Rome to Fontainebleau for a historic meeting with Napoleon, who was about to be crowned emperor. A year earlier Napoleon had installed a military school in the buildings. He had the apartments refurnished in the new Empire style. The Cour du Cheval Blanc became the Cour d'Honneur, the Courtyard of Honor. The wing called the Aile de Ferrare was torn down and replaced by an iron fence and gate, which made the façade visible.

  In 1808 Napoleon placed his throne in the former bedroom of the kings, where the royal bed had once stood. Under the old monarchy courtiers saluted that bed as a symbol of royal authority. Napoleon wanted to show his empire's continuity with earlier French rulers. It is the only throne room in France still in its original state, with its original furniture. A portrait of Louis XIII over the fireplace was burned in 1793, so Napoleon hung a portrait of himself by Robert Lefèvre. In 1834 Louis-Philippe replaced it with another Louis XIII.

  Napoleon also took six rooms of his own, separate from the royal apartments. A door hidden behind the drapery beside his bed led to his private library and the offices below. The bed was crowned with an imperial eagle and carried figures representing Glory, Justice and Abundance. His carpet had the shape of the cross of the Legion of Honor. In 1811 he added a camp bed like the one he used on campaign, so he could rest briefly and go back to work. His bath held a tinned copper tub, and a varnished metal tub for soaking his feet.

  Between 1812 and 1814 the château became a very elegant prison for Pope Pius VII. In November 1810 the chapel hosted the baptism of Napoleon's nephew, the future Napoleon III. Napoleon was his godfather and Empress Marie-Louise his godmother.

  Napoleon spent his last days as ruler at Fontainebleau. Under pressure from his Marshals Ney, Berthier and Lefebvre, he abdicated there on the 4th of April 1814. He signed on a small table in his simple private study, which is still on display. On the 20th of April, after surviving a suicide attempt, he bade an emotional farewell to the Old Guard in the Court of Honor. He stopped at Fontainebleau again on the 20th of March 1815, during the Hundred Days.

  Writing his memoirs in exile on Saint Helena, Napoleon recalled Fontainebleau as "the true residence of kings, the house of the centuries." He called it the most comfortable and happily situated palace in Europe.

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• 8. Fall and Rescue

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  In 1861 a delegation from the King of Siam brought gifts for Napoleon III, and the Empress Eugénie turned them into a museum. In 1867 she remade rooms on the ground floor of the Gros Pavillon to display her collection of Asian art. Some pieces had been taken when a British-French military expedition destroyed and looted the Old Summer Palace near Beijing in 1860. Visitors see two royal palanquins from Siam, black-and-gold lacquered panels from 17th-century Chinese screens, and a Tibetan stupa containing a Buddha. Guests also played with an old bagatelle game and a mechanical piano. In 1868 she added a Salon of Lacquerware, the last room decorated before the Empire fell.

  Napoleon III had resumed long summer stays and restored the Gallery of Deer. A fire in 1856 destroyed the 18th-century theater. The architect Hector Lefuel had begun a new one in 1854, inspired by the Royal Opera of Versailles and the Théâtre de la Reine at the Petit Trianon. It had four hundred seats, two balconies and horseshoe-shaped boxes. Famous actors from Paris theaters performed portions of plays for the emperor's guests.

  In 1870 the Second Empire fell, and the château closed. The Prussian army occupied it on the 17th of September 1870, and from March 1871 Frederick Charles of Prussia used it as a headquarters. Afterward the School of Applied Artillery moved in, driven out of Alsace when Germany annexed the province. Presidents of the Third Republic sometimes stayed there and welcomed foreign kings. The last survivor of its royal residents, the Empress Eugénie, visited on the 26th of June 1920.

  Protection came in stages. The façades of the major buildings were classified as historic monuments on the 20th of August 1913. In 1923 the Écoles d'Art Américaines, schools of art and music, settled in, and they still exist today. In 1927 the château became a national museum. Between the wars a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation paid to rebuild the upper floors of the Belle Cheminée wing, burned in 1856.

  German forces occupied Fontainebleau on the 16th of June 1940 until the 10th of November, and again from the 15th of May to the end of October 1941. After the war, part of the château housed Western Union and later NATO's Allied Forces Central Europe, until 1966. A general restoration followed between 1964 and 1968 under President Charles de Gaulle and his Minister of Culture, Andre Malraux. UNESCO classified the palace as a World Heritage Site in 1981. A Museum of Napoleon I opened in 1986 in the wing of the princes of the First Empire. In 2006 the Ministry of Culture bought the royal stables and began restoring them.

  Restoration of Napoleon III's theater began in 2007. The government of Abu Dhabi paid ten million euros, and in exchange the theater was renamed for Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan. It was inaugurated on the 30th of April 2014. Plays cannot be staged there, because the stage and some other working parts were left out of the restoration. As of April 2024 visitors find little more than the royal box and an empty stage.

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