It is with great pleasure that I am updating this older post in my blog. The Jardin des Tuileries were my next door relaxation while working in Paris for several years, many times just walked on it and have my lunch while looking at the wonderful architecture and history all around me. Therefore, let me tell you more and more of the glorious Jardin des Tuileries of Paris!
I always love to tell you about a wonderful beautiful inmense garden I came to love and became my favorite. I had visited before, visiting is different than living as many should know. Of course, I am talking about the Tuileries garden or Jardin des Tuileries in Paris. I came to know it intimately while working off rue de Castiglione off rue de Rivoli for several years. It was my lunch break lol!!! and on weekends will bring the family to walk on it , poney rides, and swings the fairs of many games on it, the Grande roue , all very memorable moments and a thrill to past by it once in a while now.
You get there on metro Tuileries (design of Hector Guimard),the entrance is located along the Tuileries garden, rue de Rivoli on line 1 or Concorde lines 1, 8 and 12 . The line 1 of the Metro built has two staircases with low frames with cartridges with an entrance and an exit. The Tuileries Garden is open daily from 7h30 to 21h. Also, bus lines 20 21 68 72 73, 84 , as the closest , and my best parkings underground here are Concorde Place de la Concorde (corner of Avenue Gabriel and Place de la Concorde), and Tuileries by 38, rue du Mont Tabor (now not open to the public).
It is actually a series of gardens and the locals sometimes call it the Jardins des Tuileries in plural. There is the Tuileries and then the Carrousel. Let me tell you a bit on them and more now.
The Jardin des Tuileries garden extends from the Palais du Louvre (east) to the Place de la Concorde (West), it is bordered to the north by the Rue de Rivoli, the place de Pyramides and to the south by the Seine river . The Arc du Carrousel, built in 1806 in the Carousel’s garden, marks the entrance to the Tuileries. The Palace of the Tuileries, which closed the Louvre on its west side, was burned during the commune in 1871 and its ruins were razed in 1881 by the third Republic. From the 1st arrondissement or district created in the 16C to the site of old Tuileries which gave it its name. It is the most important and oldest French garden of Paris, which used to be the palace of the Tuileries, a former royal and imperial residence, now extinct. I was a former treasurer to rebuilt it but it is difficult and costly almost 400M€, believe the effort is dead unless Stéphane Bern come in …
The Rue de Rivoli is located in the early 19C between Rue de Rohan and rue Saint-Florentin, in particular the impasse and the grounds occupied by the Dames-de-l’Assomption. The garden then expanded during the development of the Tuileries Wharf, a support wall is built along the terrace of the water’s edge, with stones extracted from the quarries of Châtillon. In 1519, king François 1er had chosen this vast land occupied since the 12C by tile factories (hence Tuileries) . In 1553 Catherine de Medici decided to settle in the Louvre and to have a castle built, she bought land at the Tuileries and built an Italian park with fountains, a cave, a greenhouse and a menagerie, the Palais des Tuileries.
Catherine de Medici buys these lands between the walls of Charles V and the walls of the Fausses Jaunes (ditches). Starting from 1564, it began the construction of the Palais des Tuileries, while beginning the development of an Italian garden to the west until the glacis of the enclosure (present Place de la Concorde). It consists of six aisles in the straight direction and eight in the witdth direction, which rectangular compartments comprising different plantations (trees, quinconces, lawns, flower beds, etc.). In the years 1605-1625 an orangery and a petting zoo were added. In 1664, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and King Louis XIV ordered the garden to be entirely redesigned by André Le Nôtre, who had already illustrated himself in Vaux-le-Vicomte. Royal Gardens of Versailles, Marly, Saint-Cloud and Saint-Germain en Laye. The destruction of the Palace of the Tuileries opened a perspective towards the Place de la Concorde, the Avenue of the Champs Elysees, the Arc de Triomphe, the Avenue of the Grand Armée, and the Grand Arche de la Defense.
At the western angles of the garden, Napoleon III ordered built two identical buildings:
An orangery in 1852, in the southwest, today hosting a museum of modern Art, the Musée de l’Orangerie (see post). The Museum of the Orangerie is a museum of impressionistic and Impressionists paintings located in the garden of the Tuileries, at the western end of the terrace of the waterfront, Place de la Concorde it presents works by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Amedeo Modigliani, Le Douanier Rousseau, André Derain, Chaïm-Soutien, Marie Laurencin, Maurice Utrillo, Paul Gauguin, Alfred Sisley and Kees van Dongen.
A Jeu de Paume in 1861, today hosting a museum of Contemporary Art, the National Gallery of Jeu de Paume. The Jeu de Paume Museum.(see post) The building is located on the terraces by rue de Rivoli dominating the Place de la Concorde in the Tuileries garden. The Jeu de Paume game was built in 1861 on the model of the Orangerie was a gym where the ancestor of tennis was practised. At the beginning of the 20C, the building is a national museum. The museum was remodelled in 1986, following the opening of the Musée d’Orsay, and became a place of temporary exhibitions.
The Tuileries Garden, is of major historical importance, has 22.4 hectares. Between the wings of the Louvre, the Carousel garden is 6.2 hectares. The Tuileries and the Carrousel are separated by the Tuileries Terrace. These two gardens are accessible to visitors.. To the east, three small gardens enshrine the building: Along the Rue de Rivoli lies the Jardin de l’Oratoire (4 500 m2), and, opposite the Seine, the Jardin de l’Infante (3 900 m2) and the Jardin de Raffet (1 250 m2). These small gardens are not accessible to the public.
Ok so not much on the other gardens but will give you an overview from my books on the history of Paris. The Oratory garden takes its name from the religious building opposite, between 145 rue Saint-Honoré and 160 rue de Rivoli. The construction of this building was started in 1620 and completed in 1748. A statue of Admiral de Coligny, by the sculptor Gustave Crauk, was erected at his bedside in 1889, to recall the Saint-Barthélémy massacre perpetrated against the Protestants in 1572.
The Garden of the Infanta recalls the ephemeral fiancée of Louis XV, who was an “infanta” of Spain, that is to say a child of the Spanish royal family. In 1721, little María Ana Victoria was promised to her cousin the King of France when she was only three years old and he was eleven. She was sent to Paris, where she arrived on March 2, 1722. Given her rank, she was housed in the Louvre in the queen-mothers’ apartment. A garden is created for her, which she can admire from her windows and where she likes to play. It is adorned with a set of statues representing the nymphs of Diana, brought back from the parc de Marly (Yvelines 78 see post). In June 1722, when the king moved to Versailles, his fiancée followed him. But from 1725, she was sent back to Spain, so that Louis XV could marry Marie Leczinska, the daughter of the King of Poland. Of its short stayed at the court of France, only the name of this garden remains, which has been modified several times.
The name of the Raffet garden keeps the memory of the monuments to the great painters who adorned the eastern perimeter of the Louvre, a sort of “Pantheon of all the masters of the art” wanted by the Third Republic. The ditch below the Colonnade de Perrault was then filled in and flowerbeds formed a green and flowery setting for the building. On the lawns, sculptures were placed in honor of Velázquez, Boucher or Meissonier. Facing the Seine stood a monument to Auguste Raffet, a romantic painter who had illustrated the Napoleonic epic in the front, a grenadier drummed, while military trophies recalled the exploits of the Grande Armée . Since then, the bronze soldier has been melted down by the Vichy regime for the recovery of non-ferrous metals on behalf of the Nazis, then the marble bust was deposited by order of André Malraux in 1966. Only the column remains.
The gardens of the Carrousel and the Tuileries are true museums of open-air sculptures: At the carousel are exposed twenty sculptures of Aristide Maillol and the Tuileries, the visitor can admire more than 200 statues and vases of first importance, ranging from 17C to 21C. This vast garden offers varied walks, at the rhythm of the seasons, and relaxation areas for young and old alike. Some of my favorite statues here are by Auguste Caïn Deux Lionesses attacking a bull the Nubian lion and his prey lion and wild boar igre slaying a crocodile. By Aristide Maillol the Mountain (1937) The Air (1938) The River (1938) Elongated Girl (1921) The Nymph (1930) The Three Graces (1938). By Paul Gand Medea Statue in marble. By Louis Lévêque, the Young Nymph (1866). By Pierre le Gros Vetturie (1665).
Paintings immortalizing the Tuileries gardens amongst my favorites are by Édouard Manet, music at the Tuileries Garden (1862), Adolph von Menzel, afternoon at the Tuileries Garden (1867) Claude Monet, Les Tuileries (1876),. Maurice Prendergast, the Tuileries Garden (1895), Camille Pissarro, the Tuileries Gardens (1900), and Paul de Castro, the Tuileries Garden in Autumn (1921).
During WWII, part of the garden was transformed into a depot because of the lack of supplies during the Occupation. On 25 August 1944, General von Choltitz, commanding officer of the “Groß-Paris”, received an ultimatum from Colonel Pierre Billotte of the 2nd DB and replied “I do not accept ultimatums”. In the ensuing fighting, Captain Branet seized the hotel Meurice, rue de Rivoli, headquarters of the Nazis occupying forces; Captain Julien goes to the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré to reach the siege of the Kommandantur, Place de l’Opéra and on his side Lieutenant Bricard clears the Tuileries garden. The ten commemorative plaques affixed along the garden at the corner of Rue de Rivoli and Place de la Concorde do not fully account for the intensity of the fighting and the number of casualties.
Since 2005, the management of the Tuileries Garden has been entrusted to the Louvre museum, which ensures the development and maintenance of it. A real treat in Paris.
Some webpages to help you plan your trip to this wonderful beautiful garden park are:
The Paris tourist office on the Jardin des Tuileries: https://en.parisinfo.com/paris-museum-monument/71304/Jardin-des-Tuileries
The city of Paris on the Jardin des Tuileries: https://www.paris.fr/equipements/jardin-des-tuileries-1795
The Ïle de France region tourist board on the Jardin des Tuileries: https://www.visitparisregion.com/en/garden-of-tuileries
The managing Louvre museum on the Jardin des Tuileries: https://www.louvre.fr/en/departments/carrousel-tuileries-gardens
Hope you enjoy all Parisiens do even if loaded with tourists in a heavily visited area of Paris. The Jardin des Tuileries is a must to see in Paris. So much part of the history and landscape of Paris. We love it!!!
And remember, happy travels, good health, and many cheers to all !!!
Paris1972-Versailles2003 