The Château de Pompignan is a mid-18th-century château standing on a terrace above the village of Pompignan, Tarn-et-Garonne, which lies on the old Paris road (now the D820), about 25 km north-west of Toulouse, France.
Of some literary and historical interest because of the association with its builder, Jean-Jacques Lefranc, the first Marquis de Pompignan, the château is noteworthy today for containing in its grounds a good example, though in neglected and dilapidated condition, of a parc à fabriques - a landscape garden with architectural constructions and hydraulic systems (together known in English as follies).
Acquired by its present owner in 1990, the chateau itself is in good repair, though sparsely furnished, as it serves to house the owner's collection of keyboard instruments. This may be the largest private collection in France of keyboard instruments from around the world. Refurbishment work on the château is in progress with the object of creating a permanent museum to display this collection to the general public.To read an article (in French; dated March 2010) published by the regional newspaper, where the current owner outlines his plans for the chateau, see here. The article contains a recent unposed photograph of the main façade of the building. Within the grounds, a deconsecrated church provides a 200-seat concert hall, and in recent years international piano competitions have been held there.
In May 2011, a decision was taken to route the proposed new TGV line from Bordeaux to ToulouseOfficial map showing proposed affected zone near Pompignan, 1k wide as it passes through the château's park.Official satellite photo with route overlay. through the grounds of the château. While the building itself and its entrance lodge have been listed Protection is extended to " ... the façades and coverings of the chateau and entrance lodge; the entrance railings; the boundary wall; the terrace." as a historic monument since 1951, and classified as suchSee here for classification listing (in French), where it is called hotel - a large private residence - rather than chateau since 1972, the protection does not extend directlyThere is provision in the legislation to extend protection to the "field of view" of the monument, in both directions, with a default distance of 500m. Interference would require the joint approval of both the local council and Architecte des bâtiments de France, the state body responsible for monuments. These bodies could also by agreement change the perimeter of the field of view. See French Wikipedia article here; the section Conséquences sur les abords gives details and further references. to the remainder of the park or its contents.
Description of the chateau The village of Pompignan is located a day's journey (25 km) from Toulouse on the natural road along the right bank of the Garonne to Bordeaux, and it was a way stop even in pre-Roman times. Its name is derived from Pompinianum, the domain of Pompinius, a notable of the Gallo-Roman era, whose villa was sited on the edge of the hillside about a kilometer south of the present chateau.Details here provided by the mairie of Pompignan. There is evidence to suggest that a ninth-century feudal manor house existed on or close to the present chateau site. The modern village grew up at the foot of the chateau in the time of the Lefrancs, and its layout and facilities were shaped by the needs and gifts of the owners.
The chateau was built on the foundations of the existing manor house in the emerging neo-classical style, similar in some respects to the Petit Trianon at Versailles (built between 1762 and 1768, a few years later than Pompignan). However, while the fenestration proportions are similar, the facades at Pompignan are much less ornate, relying for their decorative effect on brickwork details, the play of colour between brick and rendering, and on the indentations produced by the short nibs at the centre and either end of the main (south-eastern) façade. Both buildings are oriented towards views of landscape gardens, but Pompignan was planned as such, whereas the hameau at the Petit Trianon was added twenty years afterwards, by a different architect and patron.
The terrace on which the chateau sits, some ten to twenty metres above the village, is girdled with a massive brick retaining wall, in good condition, which is a listed item in the protection notices.
Lefranc’s chateau is built on a stone base, mainly from pink Toulouse brick, with delicate use of gray render to achieve a tawny effect in good light. It is carefully oriented (along a northwest-southeast axis) to take advantage of existing natural views created by its position on a terrace overlooking the valley of the Garonne to the west and the rising hillside to the east. Nearly all the windows, and the terraces on three sides, provide excellent views. The fourth side consists of a library with clerestory and stained-glass windows, and it overlooks the entry gate-lodge,There are good images of the gate lodge at Google Street View (rue Lefranc de Pompignan), in which the scallop of St Jacques can be seen crowning the decorative grillwork on the gate, and also of sections of the brick retaining wall (Chemin de la Vignée). farm buildings and church.
The plan of the chateau is a rectangle of some 18m by 50m, with a semi-circular two-story bay on the north side. A sketch of the facade dating from 1802from one of the sketches in the carnet de 1802, reproduced in Cranga, P189, fig 18. shows a one-story columned semi-circular portico at the central nib, and a one-story bay extension to the southern nib. These are no longer in place.
The monuments listings (refs 4 and 5 below) note "... [a] ground floor, two tiled floors, an attic floor ..." and "... a semi-circular part on the north facade which was once occupied by a theater." Although undocumented here, there is also an extensive basement level. The 'habitable' floor area, at 2,700 sqm without counting the bay, is almost twice that of the Petit Trianon, and more than half that of the Grand Trianon.
Work began in 1745, and received further impetus - and funding - with Lefranc's marriage in 1757.To Marie-Antoinette Félicité de Caulaincourt, widow of Pierre Grimod du Fort, paymaster general of Postes et Relais de France, the early French postal system. Cited in Cranga, p188 The Toulousian architect Nelle (or Nelli) was in charge of the works, which probably took place in two phases. The renovated church, and hence certainly the main building, was in place by 1762,Tarn-et-Garonne Departmental Archives, 3 E 2 757, per Cranga p191, footnote 23. thus pre-dating the Petit Trianon by several years. This phase included the construction of the retaining and boundary walls, and improvements to the chateau de Monplaisir. It is clear from documents preserved in the family archives that the Marquis de Pompignan was personally involved with the architectural conception and the ornamentation of the buildings, evidenced by letters, plans, designs and annotations in his own hand.
After he left Paris definitivelyHe was effectively laughed out of town, by sustained and vituperative attacks by Voltaire and other academicians whose votes for the seat he had rewarded with vehement criticism in his maiden speech to the Academy in 1760. He was, however, rewarded with the marquisate by the king in 1763, for his services in defending royal and ecclesiastical privileges. in 1763, Lefranc was again able to devote more of his attention to the garden project, and major structural elements were put in place between 1766 and 1774.Per Cranga, p191, first para, it is possible to follow from documents in the Lefranc family archives the progress of the works. It was finally judged complete by its author (who was then 71 years old) in 1780, 35 years after he had started.
Jean-Georges-Louis-Marie Lefranc de Pompignan (1760–1840), son of the builder, inherited the estate on the death of his father in 1784. Like his father, he too married well,To Louise de Beaumont-Baynac, niece of the archbishop of Paris, Christophe de Beaumont. Cited in Cranga, p191 and was in a position to attend to his country estates. It appears as if he also commissioned worksCranga, p191 and footnote 26. in the park, and it is not possible at present to distinguish which Lefranc was responsible for which part of the garden.
The park and its follies
The main façade looks out over lawns with magnificent specimen trees, then across undulating meadows which give glimpses of the follies and water features, and finally upwards over the rising forest until the view is cut off at the horizon created by the top of the ridge. No buildings are visible from this direction. (The planned railway line - see below - will run parallel to this façade at a distance of some 250m.)
In the opposite direction, the windows facing a little north of west overlook the church and small village of Pompignan, through which run, in parallel and only some 60m apart at this point, the main road from Toulouse to Montauban and, west of it, the Canal de Garonne. Beyond lies the flat valley of the Garonne and the low hills of the Gers.
On a clear day, the Pyrenees are visible along the southern horizon, and the short southern façade faces the mountains more directly, while also allowing the remainder of the village, the road and the canal to be observed in the direction of Toulouse.
The terrace on which the chateau and its lawns sit forms the point of a promontory, and the park stretches away from it to the east, enclosing a thickly-wooded valley of undulating and then rising land some 35 hectares in extent. The park’s long south-eastern boundary is formed by the road running along the edge of the ridge above, the chemin de la moissagaise, part of the ancient pilgrimage Way of St James that leads from Moissac, some 40 km downstream, to Compostella in Spain. Within the park just off this road is a small shrine, which still receives visits, especially in the months of May and June, the traditional time of the pilgrimage.
The idea of the park
The design of the chateau is representative of the move away from the extreme ornamentation and grandiosity of buildings prevailing at the end of the 17th and early 18th centuries and the move towards simpler and more classical lines. This tendency was echoed in garden design by a move away from formal, 'French' gardens, and towards the ideas incorporated in the 'English' garden which was coming into vogue in France by the mid-18th century: informal, natural-seeming, painterly landscapes, enhanced with built structures (follies) to accompany views, disguise functional structures, create moods or references to landscapes from antiquity or imagined.
Lefranc spent much of his early life in the Château de Cayx, where some of the inspiration (in terms of siting, landscape and views) for Pompignan is found. Cayx had at least one folly as well, a belvedere,A picture of this structure, a semi-circular porch supported by seven columns from which Lefranc's additions have been removed, can be found in Cranga, p195. which Lefranc converted into his study, and in which he wrote Didon (1734), his first literary success.