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Origin and history

In the 15th century, the Domaine de Sceaux came into being with a mansion belonging to John II Baillet, seigneur of Sceaux, who received Louis XI there in 1470. The seigneury, consisting of three fiefs together, remained in the Baillet family until the end of the 16th century, before being acquired in 1597 by Louis Potier de Gesvres, who built there a castle of Henri IV or Louis XIII style. The property, erected as a baronie in 1624, then passed into the hands of the Potier de Gesvres family, which grew and became a real estate.

In 1670 Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the chief financial officer of Louis XIV, bought the land of Sceaux to become his country residence. He expanded the estate to nearly 100 hectares and drew a French-style park by André Le Nôtre, decorated with statues commissioned by renowned sculptors such as Antoine Coysevox and François Girardon. The castle, renovated in a sober style to avoid competing with Versailles, hosts sumptuous festivals, including a visit by Louis XIV in 1677. Colbert died there in 1683, leaving the estate to his son, the Marquis de Seignelay.

The Marquis de Seignelay, heir to Colbert, continued to beautify the estate by adding an apartment decorated with Chinese lacquers and by building an orangery by Jules Hardouin-Mansart in 1686. It also expanded the park to 227 hectares by purchasing the seigneury of Châtenay and by digging a large 1,140-metre canal, completed in 1691. The estate became a place of lavish receptions, such as the one organized in 1685 for Louis XIV, where a work by Lully and Racine was performed. Upon the death of Seignelay in 1690, the estate passed to his widow and was sold in 1700 to the Duke of Maine, the legitimized son of Louis XIV and Madame de Montespan.

Under the duke and duchess of Maine, Sceaux became a high place in the worldly life of the eighteenth century. The Duchess, granddaughter of the Grand Condé, held a brilliant court there and created in 1703 the order of the Mouches in Honey, a gallant society. After his death in 1753, the estate passed to his descendants, including the Duke of Penthièvre, who brought decorations painted by François Boucher and Alexis Peyrotte. At the Revolution, the estate was confiscated as a national property in 1793 and destroyed in part by a merchant, Jean François Hippolyte Lecomte, who bought the land in 1798 and demolished the castle to sell its materials.

In the 19th century, the estate was purchased in 1828 by Anne-Marie Lecomte-Stuart, wife of the Duke of Treviso, who had a new Louis XIII style castle rebuilt between 1856 and 1862 at the site of the old castle. The park, replanted according to the original plans of Le Nôtre, becomes a place of receptions under the Second Empire. In 1923, the estate was acquired by the Seine department (now Hauts-de-Seine) to avoid its destruction. Restored from 1928, it has been home to the Musée de l'Île-de-France since 1937, renowned in 2013 as the Musée du Domaine départemental de Sceaux. Today, the park, open to the public, preserves remains of the 17th and 18th centuries, such as orangery, the pavilion of the Aurora and the great waterfalls.

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