Meudon
Town hall
Paris and inner ring départements
Location within Île-de-France region  Meudon
Administration
Country	France
Region	Île-de-France
Department	Hauts-de-Seine
Arrondissement	Boulogne-Billancourt
Canton	Meudon
Intercommunality	Arc de Seine
Mayor	Hervé Marseille (NC) (2001–present)
Statistics
Elevation	28–179 m (92–587 ft) (avg. 103 m or 338 ft)
Land area1	9.90 km2 (3.82 sq mi)
Population2	45,682  (2006)
- Density	4,614 /km2 (11,950 /sq mi)
INSEE/Postal code	92048/ 92190, 92360
1 French Land Register data, which excludes lakes, ponds, glaciers > 1 km² (0.386 sq mi or 247 acres) and river estuaries.
2 Population without double counting: residents of multiple communes (e.g., students and military personnel) only counted once.

Coordinates: 48°48′27″N 2°14′25″E / 48.8075°N 2.2403°E / 48.8075; 2.2403

Meudon (French pronunciation: [mø.dɔ̃]) is a municipality in the southwestern suburbs of Paris, France. It is in the département of Hauts-de-Seine. It is located 9.1 km (5.7 mi) from the center of Paris.

Geography[link]

The town of Meudon is built on the hills and valleys of the Seine. The wood of Meudon lies for the most part to the west of the town. The northwest part of Meudon, overlooking the Seine, is known as Bellevue ("beautiful view").

History[link]

At Meudon, the Argile Plastique clay was extensively mined in the 19th century. The first fossil of the European diatryma Gastornis parisiensis was discovered in these deposits by Gaston Planté.

Archaeological sites show that Meudon has been populated since Neolithic times.

The Gauls called the area Mol-Dum (sand dune), and the Romans Latinized the name as Moldunum.

The handsome Galliera Institutions, on the hill of Fleury, were founded by the duchess of Galliera for the care of aged persons and orphans. The buildings were completed in 1885.

The old castle of Meudon was rebuilt in Renaissance style in the mid-sixteenth century. It was bought by Louis XIV as a residence for Louis, le Grand Dauphin, under whom Meudon became a center of aristocratic life. After the death of le Grand Dauphin in 1711 the château was neglected, emptied in the Revolutionary sales, and finally burned at the close of the Franco-Prussian War, 1871, while it was occupied by Prussian soldiers. A branch of the Paris Observatory was founded in 1877 on the ruins. The Meudon town hall sits some 43 m (141.08 ft) in altitude above that of Paris and the climb from there to the observatory offers some rewarding views of Paris.

Automotive Pioneering[link]

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot, the inventor of the 'world's first automobile', is reported to have carried out some early trials at Meudon in the early 1770s.

Pioneering Aviation[link]

Chalais-Meudon was important in the pioneering of aviation, initially balloons and airships, but also the early powered craft. 'Hangar Y' (at 48°47′52″N 2°13′59″E / 48.7977°N 2.233°E / 48.7977; 2.233) was built in 1880 on request of the military engineer Captain Charles Renard (1847–1905), for the construction of balloons and airships. The building is 70 meters long, 24 meters wide and around 26 meters high. The airship 'La France', designed by Charles Renard and Arthur Krebs, was built in Hangar Y in 1884 and was the first airship which was controllable during flight and which could return to its starting point.^[1]

Economy[link]

Although a choice residential district, access to the railway (RER) and the Seine River have made Meudon a manufacturing center since the 1840s. Metal products and military explosives have been continuously produced here since then.

Scientific facilities[link]

In addition to the Observatory, what is today ONERA, a national research institute on aerospace topics (and wind tunnels), has been present since the military opened its aerostatic (lighter-than-air) field in the Chalais park in 1877. From 1921 to 1981 the Air Museum was located here until it moved to Le Bourget Airport.

CNRS has a campus in Bellevue.

Transport[link]

Meudon Val Fleury Station

Meudon is served by Meudon – Val Fleury station on Paris RER line C. Meudon is also served by two stations on the Transilien Paris – Montparnasse suburban rail line: Meudon and Bellevue.

Finally Meudon is served by the Meudon-sur-Seine station on the Paris tramway line T2.

The area was once served by the Bellevue funicular, a model of which is in the local Museum of Art and History.

International relations[link]

Meudon is twinned with:

• Mazkeret Batia, Israel
• Celle, Germany^[2]
• Farnborough and Aldershot, England
• Brezno, Slovakia
• Ciechanow, Poland

Personalities[link]

• Rodin's villa des Brillants, now a museum of his art, is located here, as is his grave.
• Grand Duke Boris Vladimirovich of Russia lived here in exile in Château Sans-Souci (in Bellevue), from 1920.
• Richard Wagner was a resident (No. 27 Av. du Château), and here composed The Flying Dutchman.
• Louis-Ferdinand Céline lived here until his death, and is buried in Bas Meudon.
• Painter May Alcott lived here until her death.
• Artists Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber-Arp were resident here from 1929-1940. Their neighbours were the artist and architect Theo van Doesburg and his wife Nelly.
• The town has a monument to Rabelais who died here as canon of Meudon, where he held the benefice from 1551-1552.
• Charle-Michel Marle, mathematician, born in 1934, has lived in Meudon since 1970.
• Jean-Luc Marion was born in 1946.
• Clémence Poésy, French actress best known for her portrayal of Fleur Delacour in the Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire movie.
• Lionel Jospin, former France prime minister was born here.
• André Kertész, photographer legend, took a famous photo of the train viaduct in Meudon.
• Marcel Dupré, perhaps the most famous French organist of the 20th century, lived and worked in Meudon. He transformed his home into a small concert hall; the current owners of the home still hold public concerts there.^[3]
• Nicolas Isimat-Mirin, footballer
• Gregoire Defrel, footballer
• Adama Soumare, footballer

See also[link]

• Communes of the Hauts-de-Seine department

References[link]

• INSEE

Notes

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Meudon

• Ville de Meudon website
• Le musée de Meudon
• Observatoire de Paris (Paris Observatory)

v t e  Communes in the Metropolitan Area of Paris Population over 2 million City of Paris Population over 100,000 Argenteuil Boulogne-Billancourt Montreuil Saint-Denis Population over 75,000 Asnières-sur-Seine Aulnay-sous-Bois Champigny-sur-Marne Colombes Courbevoie Créteil Nanterre Rueil-Malmaison Saint-Maur-des-Fossés Versailles Vitry-sur-Seine Population over 50,000 Antony Aubervilliers Le Blanc-Mesnil Bondy Cergy Chelles Clamart Clichy Drancy Épinay-sur-Seine Évry Fontenay-sous-Bois Issy-les-Moulineaux Ivry-sur-Seine Levallois-Perret Maisons-Alfort Neuilly-sur-Seine Noisy-le-Grand Pantin Sarcelles Sartrouville Sevran Villejuif Population over 25,000 Alfortville Athis-Mons Bagneux Bagnolet Bezons Bobigny Bois-Colombes Brunoy Cachan Charenton-le-Pont Châtenay-Malabry Châtillon Chatou Le Chesnay Choisy-le-Roi Clichy-sous-Bois Conflans-Sainte-Honorine Corbeil-Essonnes La Courneuve Draveil Élancourt Ermont Franconville Fresnes Gagny La Garenne-Colombes Garges-lès-Gonesse Gennevilliers Gonesse Goussainville Grigny Guyancourt L'Haÿ-les-Roses Herblay Houilles Le Kremlin-Bicêtre Livry-Gargan Malakoff Mantes-la-Jolie Massy Meaux Melun Meudon Montigny-le-Bretonneux Montrouge Les Mureaux Neuilly-sur-Marne Nogent-sur-Marne Noisy-le-Sec Palaiseau Le Perreux-sur-Marne Pierrefitte-sur-Seine Plaisir Poissy Pontault-Combault Pontoise Puteaux Rambouillet Ris-Orangis Romainville Rosny-sous-Bois Saint-Cloud Saint-Germain-en-Laye Saint-Ouen Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Sannois Savigny-sur-Orge Savigny-le-Temple Stains Sucy-en-Brie Suresnes Taverny Thiais Trappes Tremblay-en-France Vanves Vigneux-sur-Seine Villemomble Villeneuve-Saint-Georges Villepinte Villiers-le-Bel Villiers-sur-Marne Vincennes Viry-Châtillon Yerres Population under 25,000 1,460 other communes

v t e Communes of the Hauts-de-Seine department Antony Asnières-sur-Seine Bagneux Bois-Colombes Boulogne-Billancourt Bourg-la-Reine Châtenay-Malabry Châtillon Chaville Clamart Clichy Colombes Courbevoie Fontenay-aux-Roses Garches La Garenne-Colombes Gennevilliers Issy-les-Moulineaux Levallois-Perret Malakoff Marnes-la-Coquette Meudon Montrouge Nanterre Neuilly-sur-Seine Le Plessis-Robinson Puteaux Rueil-Malmaison Saint-Cloud Sceaux Sèvres Suresnes Vanves Vaucresson Ville-d'Avray Villeneuve-la-Garenne

Hubert Robert by Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (Louvre

Hubert Robert (22 May 1733 – 15 April 1808), French artist, was born in Paris.

His father, Nicolas Robert, was in the service of François-Joseph de Choiseul, marquis de Stainville a leading diplomat from Lorraine. Young Robert finished his studies with the Jesuits at the Collège de Navarre in 1751 and entered the atelier of the sculptor Michel-Ange Slodtz who taught him design and perspective but encouraged him to turn to painting. In 1754 he left for Rome in the train of Étienne-François de Choiseul, son of his father's employer, who had been named French ambassador and would become a Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs to Louis XV in 1758.

Imaginary view of the Gallery of the Louvre as a Ruin, Salon of 1796 (Louvre)

Years in Rome[link]

He spent fully eleven years in Rome, a remarkable length of time; after the young artist's official residence at the French Academy in Rome ran out, he supported himself by works he produced for visiting connoisseurs like the abbé de Saint-Non, who took Robert to Naples in April 1760 to visit the ruins of Pompeii. The marquis de Marigny, director of the Bâtiments du Roi kept abreast of his development in correspondence with Natoire, director of the French Academy, who urged the pensionnaires to sketch out-of-doors, from nature: Robert needed no urging; drawings from his sketchbooks document his travels: Villa d'Este, Caprarola. Robert spent his time in the company of young artists in the circle of Piranesi, whose capricci of romantically overgrown ruins influenced him so greatly that he gained the nickname Robert des ruines.^[1] The albums of sketches and drawings he assembled in Rome supplied him with motifs that he worked into paintings throughout his career.^[2]

In Paris[link]

His success on his return to Paris in 1765 was rapid: the following year he was received by the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, with a Roman capriccio, The Port of Rome, ornamented with different Monuments of Architecture, Ancient and Modern.^[3] Robert's first exhibition at the Salon of 1767 was greeted in print by Denis Diderot, "The ideas which the ruins awake in me are grand." He was successively appointed "Designer of the King's Gardens", Keeper of the King's Pictures" and "Keeper of the Museum and Councilor to the Academy".^[4]

Classical Ruins

The Revolution[link]

Robert was arrested in October 1793, during the French Revolution.^[5] He survived his detentions at Sainte-Pélagie and Saint-Lazare by painting vignettes of prison life on plates before he was freed at the fall of Robespierre.^[6] Robert narrowly escaped the guillotine when through error another prisoner died in his place. Subsequently he was placed on the committee of five in charge of the new national museum at the Palais du Louvre.

The Revolution also resulted in the destruction of some of Robert's work. Robert had designed the decorations for a little theatre in the new wing at the location of the current staircase Gabriel in the Palace of Versailles. Designed to seat about 500, this theatre was built from the summer of 1785 and opened in early 1786. It was intended to serve as an ordinary court theatre, replacing the Theatre of the Princes Court which was too old and too small, but was destroyed during the time of Louis Philippe. A watercolour of Robert's design is in the National Archives in Paris.^[7]

Robert and picturesque gardens[link]

Enterprising and prolific, Robert also acted in a role similar to that of a modern day art director, conceptualizing fashionably dilapidated gardens for several aristocratic clients, summarized by his possible intervention at Ermenonville; there he would have been working with the architect Morel for the marquis de Girardin, who was the author of Compositions des paysages (1777) and had distinct views of his own. In 1786 he began his better documented^[8] collaboration at Méréville, with his most significant patron, the financier Jean-Joseph de Laborde, who found François-Joseph Bélanger's plans too expensive and perhaps too formal. Though documents are again lacking, Hubert Robert's name is invariably invoked in connection with Marie Antoinette's 'premier architecte' Richard Mique through several phases of the creation of an informal landscape garden at the Petit Trianon, and the setting of the "petit hameau. Robert's contribution to garden design was not in making practical ground plans for improvements but in providing atmospheric inspiration for the proposed effect.^[9] At Ermenonville and at Méréville "Hubert Robert's paintings both recorded and inspired", according to W.H. Adams:^[10] Robert's four large ruin fantasies, painted in 1787 for Méréville^[11] may be searched in vain for direct connections with the garden. Hubert's paintings of the Moulin Joly of his friend Claude-Henri Watelet render the fully-grown atmosphere of a garden that had been under way since 1754. His set of six Italianate landscape panels painted for Bagatelle^[12] were not the inspiration for the formal turfed parterre set in the thinned woodlands, designed by Bélanger; the later picturesque extensions of Bagatelle were carried out by its Scottish gardener, William Blaikie.^[13] Robert's commissioned painting of the long-delayed rejuvenation of the park at Versailles, begun in 1774 with the cutting down of the trees for sale as firewood, is a record of the event, resonant with allegorical meaning.^[14] Robert was more certainly responsible for the conception of the grotto and cascades of the 'Baths of Apollo,' tucked within a grove of the chateau's park and built to house François Girardon's celebrated sculpture group Apollo Attended by Nymphs.

Villa Aldobrandini in Frascati, watercolor painting, 1762 (Czartoryski Museum)

The Terrace at Marly (Hermitage Museum)

He deserves to be remembered not so much for his skill as a painter, but as for the liveliness and point with which he treated the subjects he painted. The contrast between the ruins of ancient Rome and the life of his time excited his keenest interest. The reputation he acquired in Rome, working for a time in the studio of Pannini, whose influence can be seen in the Vue imaginaire de la galerie du Louvre en ruine (illustration).

Along with this incessant activity as an artist, his daring character and many adventures attracted general admiration and sympathy. In the fourth canto of his L'Imagination Jacques Delille celebrated Robert's miraculous escape when lost in the catacombs.

The quantity of his work is immense; the Louvre alone contains nine paintings by his hand and specimens are frequently to be met with in provincial museums and private collections. Robert's work has more or less of that scenic character which justified his selection by Voltaire to paint the decorations of his theatre at Ferney. Robert died of a stroke on 15 April 1808.

His work was much engraved by the abbé de Saint-Non, with whom he had visited Naples in the company of Fragonard during his early days; in Italy his work has also been frequently reproduced by Chatelain, Linard, Le Veau, and others.

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Adams, William Howard, The French Garden 1500–1800 (New York: Braziller) 1979.
• Huisman, Philippe, French Watercolours of the 18th Century (1969) London, Thames and Hudson ISBN 500231052
• Wiebenson, The Picturesque Garden in France (Princeton University Press) 1978.

 This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Hubert Robert

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Hubert Robert

• Joconde - Catalogue des Collections des Musées de France www.culture.gouv.fr (Ministère de la culture et de la communication) — List of the work of Robert (315 entries), French.

Da Vinci usually refers to Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), Italian Renaissance polymath. It may also refer to:

Places[link]

• Leonardo da Vinci Airport - the main international airport in Fiumicino, Rome, Italy
• Leonardo da Vinci High School - a New Technology High School in Davis, California
• Leonardo da Vinci High School Buffalo, New York - a college prep school in Buffalo, New York.
• Da Vinci (lunar crater) - a crater on the Moon
• Da Vinci Research Park - a science park located in Brussels

Ships[link]

• Leonardo da Vinci - a Conte di Cavour class battleship of the Italian navy
• Leonardo da Vinci - a Marconi class submarine of the Italian Navy.
• SS Leonardo da Vinci - an ocean liner in service for Italian Line between 1960 and 1978.
• GTS Da Vinci - a cruise ship owned by Club Cruise

Television[link]

• Da Vinci's Inquest - a 1998 Canadian dramatic television series
  • Da Vinci's City Hall - a 2005 spinoff of Da Vinci's Inquest

Technology[link]

• Da Vinci Surgical System - a robotic surgery system
• da Vinci Systems - Color Correctors
• The da Vinci Project - a planned suborbital manned spacecraft
• Texas Instruments DaVinci - a system-on-a-chip for digital video
• Da Vinci Machine - a Sun Microsystems project aiming to prototype the extension of the Java Virtual Machine to add support for dynamic languages

Music[link]

• Da Vinci (band) - a Portuguese pop rock band
• Da Vinci's Notebook - an American a cappella group.

Other[link]

• Pierino da Vinci, sculptor, Leonardo's nephew
• Giulietta da Vinci - fictional character from the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough
• Da Vinci Tower - a proposed 420-metre (1,378 ft), 80-floor tower in Dubai, United Arab Emirates
• Davinci Academy of Science and the Arts - a charter high school in Ogden, Utah.
• Leonardo da Vinci programme
• Da Vinci's Challenge - a board game
• Da Vinci (restaurant) - Michelin starred restaurant in Maasbracht, Netherlands

See also[link]

• Vinci (disambiguation)
• The Da Vinci Code (disambiguation) - the novel by Dan Brown and related items

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