François Racine de Monville

François Nicolas Henri Racine de Monville (4 October 1734 – 8 March 1797) was a French aristocrat, musician, architect and landscape designer. He is best known for his French landscape garden, the Désert de Retz, which influenced Thomas Jefferson and other later architects.

Childhood and life at the court of Louis XV
François Racine de Monville was born on 4 October 1734 in the hôtel de Mesmes on rue Sainte-Avoie in Paris. He was the son of Jean Baptiste Racine du Jonquoy, the treasurer-general for Bridges and Highways and Receiver of Finances (General Tax Collector) of the town of Alençon. De Monville was raised in Paris by his maternal grandfather, Thomas Le Monnier, who gave him a good education.

Désert de Retz
In 1774, de Monville bought a country estate at Saint-Jacques-de-Retz, which had a working farm, pasture, and woodlands, and a formal garden à la française attached to the main house. He resolved to create a French landscape garden in a style influenced by the English garden. He called the garden the Désert de Retz, planted four thousand trees from the royal greenhouses, rerouted a river, and created several ponds.

The Désert de Retz was completed in 1785 and contained twenty-one fabriques, or architectural constructions, representing different periods of history and parts of the world. They included an artificial rock entrance, a temple of rest, an outdoor theatre, a Chinese house, a ruined Gothic church, a ruined altar, a classical tomb, an obelisque, a temple to the god Pan, a Tatar tent, and an ice-house in the form of a pyramid. The best-known feature was the ruined classical column, which was large enough to contain enough rooms to be a working residence. However, de Monville preferred to reside in the much smaller Chinese house while at the Désert.