Design for a frieze for a pleasure garden
Not on view
Engraving, with a garden design, part of an album with with 30 plates (mostly folded) of garden designs created by André Mollet and dedicated to Queen Kristina of Sweden. The album intends to provide inspiration for garden designers in France and Sweden in the creation of flower beds, groves, and other garden decorations.This design consists of a design for a frieze, which could be repeated for as long as desired in the design of a garden, made up of cartouches bordered by bushed of flowers, flanked to the sides by long C-curves with grotesque eagle heads on the upper parts, which make up a kind of frame containing a vase with a bundle of stylized flowers and leaves. The design would have been created with boxwood embroideries, or by cutting grass into patterns and accentuated with hedges, flowers, and different kinds of ground cover, to achieve the 'compartiments de gazon', a type of grass designs popular in 17th-century France.
