Ecouen castle park

The Château d'Écouen, which now houses the collections of the National Renaissance Museum, is an outstanding monument of the French Renaissance. Built for the Constable Anne de Montmorency by the best artists between 1538 and 1555, it is located on a promontory overlooking the entire plain of France.

A forest borders it, crisscrossed by beautiful avenues that were once the setting for numerous hunts. According to engravings by Androuet Du Cerceau, we know that a garden, divided into sixteen enclosed squares, was planned at the castle entrance, but it seems that the necessary earthworks were never carried out, and only a niche at the base of one of the bastions still bears witness to this intention. Similarly, a grotto adorned with a splendid decoration of plants and animals was commissioned around 1556 from Bernard Palissy, the most celebrated ceramist of the time, but the Constable's death in 1567 prevented the project from being completed, and it was for Catherine de Medici at the Tuileries Palace that this grotto was finally finished.

In 1696, the castle became part of the Condé family. Jules Hardouin-Mansart then transforms the landscape by creating an esplanade at the back of the castle on which he installs three flowerbeds with sober geometric designs. These continue in the forest by a long green alley bordered by trees and groves to the South and by a "large green carpet" to the North, like that of Versailles. The forest itself is embellished with new alleys, roundabouts from which other alleys radiate.

In 1805, Napoleon decided to establish the first school for young women of the Legion of Honour in the château. A perimeter wall was then erected around the grounds. In 1810, the Prince of Beauharnais presented his sister, Queen Hortense, a patron of the institution, with a fountain at the far end of the park, presumably on the site of an older fountain called the Fontaine Madame.
When the museum was installed in this place in 1977, it was decided to restore the estate to its original appearance. If the "carpet" is irremediably truncated following urbanization, the rest of the flowerbeds and paths have been restored. The surrounding wall was pierced with a grid in 1995 to give the perspective desired by Mansart. Only the Fontaine Hortense has not yet been restored, which we hope will not be long!