Jacques Boyceau

Who was Jacques Boyceau?

Jacques Boyceau, sieur de la Barauderie was a French garden designer, the superintendent of royal gardens under Louis XIII, whose posthumously produced Traité du iardinage selon les raisons de la nature et de l'art. Ensemble divers desseins de parterres, pelouzes, bosquets et autres ornements was published in 1638. Its sixty engravings after Boyceau's designs make it one of the milestones in tracing the history of the Garden à la française. His nephew Jacques de Menours, who produced the volume, included an engraved frontispiece with the portrait of Boyceau.

A few of the plates show formally planted bosquets, but the majority are of designs for parterres. The accompanying text asserts that some of these designs have been used at royal residences: the Palais du Luxembourg, where the two axes at right angles survive from Boyceau's original plan, the Jardin des Tuileries, the newly built château of Saint Germain-en-Laye, even at the simple château at Versailles.

Boyceau was made a gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre du roi and ennobled for his efforts, as the sieur de la Barauderie.

Boyceau's book is the first French work to treat the esthetic of gardening, not simply its practice.