"One evening in Paris, we walked over to the Louvre grounds hoping to walk through the Tuileries Garden at dusk," reports Manhattan-based photographer Alice Gao. "Unfortunately it was just closing, and the gates were already up."
Fortunately, however, Alice stuck her camera through the gate openings, "just doing the best I could" to capture the golden light. We think her best is pretty perfect:
Photographs by Alice Gao.
Above: We're here to look at flowers, and we'll get to them. But first, history in a capsule.
In the mid 1500s, Catherine de Medici was in mourning for her husband—the king of France was killed jousting, after a lance went into his brain—when she commissioned the Tuileries Palace to be built on the Right Bank of the Seine. Is it any wonder she hired a landscape architect from Florence to create Italian-style gardens that would remind her of home?
Above: Catherine's grand gardens featured fountains and statues, a grotto, and canals. Also she had vineyards, and a kitchen garden, and sprawling lawns, all separated by long alleys.
Over the next centuries, the Tuileries went the way of most gardens: ephemeral, ignored and overgrown for a while, then rediscovered. New terraces got built. Royals romped. Hunts were hosted. Exotic menageries roamed the lawns. In captivity, Marie Antoinette strolled restlessly in the same golden light during the French Revolution.
In the end Catherine's gardens outlived her Tuileries Palace (which did not survive a fire set during the 1871 Paris Uprising).
Above: During Catherine's lifetime, the gardens were less appreciated than today. This had something to do with the fact that the average 16th century Frenchman was facing the threat of plague, starvation, and poverty while the queen was spending buckets of money on exorbitantly expensive architectural projects (she had a penchant for elaborately carved columns, too). As the poet Pierre de Ronsard put it:
Above: Ronsard's prophecy proved only partially prophetic; the palace is gone, yes. But the gardens, more than 400 years later, are anything but deserted.
Above: Foxgloves march alongside the lawns.
Above: The Tuileries gardens are open to the public every day; the gates close at 9 pm in the summer months and at 7:30 pm from September through March.
Above: "I mean, seriously, is it a different sun over there?" photographer Alice Gao writes. "Can I just bring this light with me to NYC, please?"
Above: An avenue lined by horse chestnut trees.
Above: For more of Alice Gao's photos from Paris, see Lingered Upon.