A01=Susan Taylor-Leduc
affective environments
Author_Susan Taylor-Leduc
Category=NH
courtly patronage
cultural geography
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
female agency in art
first empire
French landscape history
french revolution
gardens
gendered space
josephine bonaparte
marie-antoinette
picturesque
second empire
spatial politics in French gardens
Product details
- ISBN 9781041182467
- Weight: 580g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 01 Dec 2025
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Challenging the established historiography that frames the French picturesque garden movement as an international style, this book contends that the French picturesque gardens from 1775 until 1867 functioned as liminal zones at the epicenter of court patronage systems. Four French consorts—queen Marie-Antoinette and empresses Joséphine Bonaparte, Marie-Louise and Eugénie—constructed their gardens betwixt and between court ritual and personal agency, where they transgressed sociopolitical boundaries in order to perform gender and identity politics. Each patron endorsed embodied strolling, promoting an awareness of the sentient body in artfully contrived sensoria at the Petit Trianon and Malmaison, transforming these places into spaces of shared affectivity. The gardens became living legacies, where female agency, excluded from the garden history canon, created a forum for spatial politics. Beyond the garden gates, the spatial experience of the picturesque influenced the development of cultural fields dedicated to performances of subjectivity, including landscape design, cultural geography and the origination of landscape aesthetics in France.
Susan Taylor-Leduc earned both her masters and doctoral degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 1992, she has worked as a teacher, curator and university administrator in Paris. She is currently affiliated with the Centre de Recherche du Château de Versailles.
