The Tuileries and Champs-Elysees, Paris, 1900

The formal plan of the jardin as we know it today took shape at the hands of royal landscape architect André Le Nôtre, the mastermind of the gardens at Versailles, who redesigned the Tuileries gardens in 1664 with a series of allées, rows of trees, borders of hedges and fountains. At the east end of the garden Le Nôtre created a terrace looking down upon parterres, in the center of which he placed three basins. The largest of these is the one we see here, located in the open area known as the Grand Carré, and looking westward down the grand allée that bisects the garden with the obelisk of the Place de la Concorde and the Arc de Triomphe off in the distance down the Champs-Elysees.