Tourist attractions in Paris : Jardin des Tuileries

The Tuileries Garden is a public garden located between the Louvre Museum and the Place de la Concorde in the 1st arrondissement of Paris. Created by Catherine de Medicis as the garden of the Tuileries Palace in 1564, it was eventually opened to the public in 1667, and became a public park after the French Revolution. In the 19th and 20th century, it was the place where Parisians celebrated, met, promenaded and relaxed.

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Since the 13th century this area was occupied by workshops, called tuileries, making tiles for the roofs of buildings. In July 1559, after the death of her husband, Henry II, Queen Catherine de Medicis decided to move from her residence at the chateau of Tournelles, near the Bastille, to the Louvre Palace, along with her son, the new King, François II. She decided to build a new palace and garden on this site.

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She commissioned a landscape architect from Florence, Bernard de Carnesse to build an Italian Renaissance garden, with fountains, a labyrinth, and a grotto, decorated with faience images of plants and animals. The Tuileries was the largest and most beautiful garden in Paris at the time. Catherine used it for lavish royal festivities honoring ambassadors from Queen Elizabeth I of England and the marriage of her daughter, Marguerite de Valois, to the future Henry IV.

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In 1664, the landscape architect André Le Nôtre was commissioned to redesign the entire garden. Le Nôtre was the grandson of Pierre Le Nôtre, one of the gardeners of Catherine De Medici, and his father Jean was a gardener at the Tuileries. He immediately began transforming the Tuileries into a formal garden à la française, a style he had first developed at Vaux-le-Vicomte and perfected at Versailles, based on symmetry, order and long perspectives.

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The Grand Carré (eng: The Large Square) is the eastern part of the Tuilieries garden, was also created by André LeNôtre in the 17th century and follows the formal plan of the Garden à la française. The garden was remade in 1995 to showcase a collection of twenty-one statues by Aristid Maillol, which had been put in the Tuileries in 1964.

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Napoleon Bonaparte moved into the Tuileries Palace on February 19, 1800, and began making improvements to suit an imperial residence. A new street was created between the Louvre and the Place du Caroussel. In 1808 he built the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel to celebrate his victories. It is a small triumphal arch, modeled after the arch of Septimius Severus in Rome, in the middle of the Place du Carrousel with bas-relief sculptures of his battles by Jean Joseph Espercieux.

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The Orangerie at the west end of the garden close to the Seine, was built in 1852 by the architect Firmin Bourgeois. The Musée de l'Orangerie is an art gallery of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings and is most famous for being the permanent home for eight Water Lilies murals by Claude Monet. 

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The Jeu de Paume (Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume) in the north corner (west side) of the Tuileries Gardens next to the Place de la Concorde, was built in 1861. In 1927 it became an annex of the Luxembourg Palace Museum for the display of contemporary art from outside of France. During the German Occupation of World War II, from 1940 to 1944, it was used by the Germans as a depot for storing art they stole or expropriated from Jewish families. From 1947 until 1986, it served as the Musée du Jeu de Paume, which held many important Impressionist works now housed in the Musée d'Orsay. Today, the Jeu de Paume is used for exhibition of modern and contemporary art. On the terrace in front of the Jeu de Paume is a work of sculpture, Le Bel Costumé (1973) by Jean Dubuffet.


Text Source: wikipedia.org