Petit Trianon (The Temple of Love, Petit Trianon)

This twelve-columned neoclassical pavilion was commissioned by Marie Antoinette in 1778 from the architect and decorator Richard Mique (1728-94) to adorn the gardens of the Petit Trianon at Versailles. Derived from the Temple of the Sibyl at Tivoli, outside Rome, it housed a copy of a statue by Edmé Bouchardon (1698-1762) of Cupid carving his bow from the club of

Hercules. Eugène Atget made another view of this garden ornament seen through a screen of foliage as well as one of a companion pavilion, the octagonal Temple of Music, which the queen had ordered from the architect at the same time. Like her nearby mock dairy farm and the Petit Trianon itself, these two intimate shelters were refuges from the grandeur of Versailles, which dominates the park in which they all stand. For other images of Versailles see: 90.XM.64.26, 90.XM.64.28, 90.XM.64.36, 90.XM.64.42, 90.XM.64.49, 90.XM.64.59, 90.XM.64.62, 90.XM.64.64, 90.XM.64.65, and 90.XM.124.4.

Atget contrasted the white forms of the rigidly geometric temple with the irregular dark shapes of the limbs of the tree in the foreground, a direct confrontation of the artificial with the natural. The pavilion, a sad souvenir of a fallen regime, is dwarfed by the tree, a durable embodiment of a more permanent form of life. No stone acorns will fall to seed new temples.

Originally published in Eugène Atget, In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum by Gordon Baldwin (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2000), 30. ©2000, J. Paul Getty Trust.