Jean-Pierre Barrel-Deschamps

Jean-Pierre Barrel-Deschamps (1824-1873) is a French gardener and landscape designer.

Wire of a garden workman, it becomes in 1841 “monitor” of gardening, formed at the school of the foremen of “the Paternal one”, first agricultural and penitentiary colony founded with Mettray, close to Tours, in June 1839, by the Vicomte of Bretignières de Courteilles and Frederic-Auguste Demetz. In its speech for the exit of the first promotion, Bretignières de Courteilles addresses to Barrel-Deschamps these prophetic remarks: “Working gardener like your father, you will be one of our first horticulturists”.

He founds later a horticultural establishment with Bordeaux. Called in Paris by the prefect Haussmann, it takes part, under the authority of the engineer Jean-Charles Alphand and the title of first gardener as a chief of the Service of the Walks and Plantations of the Town of Paris, with the transformation of the capital within the remarkable team of professionals of which had known to be surrounded the prefect, among which one takes into account Victor Baltard, Gabriel Davioud, Jacques Hittorff… Barrel-Deschamps redraws the Bois de Boulogne and of Vincennes, and thereafter creates the Jardin of Luxembourg, the Parc Heap, that of the Parc of Hillock-Chaumont and the Parc Montsouris. In 1865, it created the English garden of the botanical garden of the Mans. In Lille it draws the Jardin Vauban, and in Roubaix the Parc Barbieux.

It creates a House of Landscape gardener, opens a seedbed and a garden with the Dumb woman and starts an international career: one calls it with Marseilles, Hyères, Milan and Turin, in Belgium, in Austria, in Prussia, and as far as Egypt where it is mandé with the Cairo by the Khedive. It arrives there in 1870 and works there until 1875, date it contracts the lung disease of which it dies in its fiftieth year.

He inaugurates a type of garden inspired by the English Jardin, characterized by undulating lawns and the sinuous shapes of the alleys and lakes. The richness and the exoticism of vegetable decoration and furniture testify to the modernity and the prosperity of the Second Empire. One could reproach Barrel-Deschamps the repetitivity of his style, described sometimes as eclectic and presented like a denaturation of the English garden by the standardization, the spirit of the place and the local characteristics being taken little into account. Nevertheless the work of Barrel-Deschamps, which will be useful in province and abroad sometimes of model, sometimes of against-model, the art of the gardens of the 19th century will characterize, and will mark of its print the 20th century.

Random links: