greetings from the Palais Ideal!

Like a giant sandcastle, the Palais Ideal seems fragile, ephemeral, a waking dream.
It was made by Joseph-Ferdinand Cheval, the facteur (postman) of the small town of Hautrives in the drome in France.
It was started in 1879 and finished in 1912, and was fully and lovingly restored over a ten-year period starting in 1983.
Cheval was a self taught artist, who gained inspiration from the engravings of wonders of the world in the journals and magazines he would deliver on his route. The Palais features elements from Hindu temples, Buddhist wats, grottos, Mayan structures, pagodas, Egyptian tombs, medevial European castles, and above all, the rocks he found along his route.
















The palais is studded with these rocks, shells he collected, and there are faint traces of poly-chroming and paintwork throughout.
However, as one can see from my pictures, it is chiefly a sandy beige color, a hue lent by the cement he used.






I have always wanted to see the Palais, having seen a few photos of it in a book as a child.
It did not disapoint.
This is, interestingly, only one of two works Cheval ever made in his lifetime.
There were, once, preparatory drawings he made for the Palais, now only one survives, but it is wonderful:
delicate, ornate and yet clear, concise and rhythmic.

I tried drawing the Palais over an afternoon, and did not get nearly such good results.I did enjoy myself, however.
The Palais sits in a garden next to the facteur's house.
It costs 5 euros to get in, and it is the only place in the still-sleepy town that might qualify as a tourist attraction. It is amazingly uncluttered, un-kitched up, with few souveniers.

The Palais has been lucky from the get-go. Although a true anomaly, and featuring some very ambitous but naive elements, the Palais has been beloved by the people of Hautrives since it's inception. The book I bought on it shows local sports teams posed for their group photos in front of it, and people came from all over France to see it.
He received fan letters, poems and tributes during his lifetime.
Curiously, this was made not just as a personal project, but specifically to be a structure open to the public and for one-and-all. The majority of the work was done after his retirement, and appears to have been done largely by himself.














It was later a favorite site of the surrealists, Picasso sketched it, and in 1969 Andre Malraux classed it as a historic monument.














The afternoon I spent there drawing (and when I took these photos), was remarkably un-crowded. There were others there, but not many. One can get up close, touch, walk it's ramparts, mosey through it's cool interior vaults freely. The staff are SO relaxed, in fact that I almost got locked in, as they left for the evening!




Even as I made my way out, no one seemed ruffled or concerned....


































































































The facteur's second work of art, also in Hautrives, was less fortuitous, but no less grand.
When his beloved daughter died as a child, he was understandably distraught.
After finishing the Palais he began work on an ornate family tomb in the local cemetary, which he called "The Tomb of Silence and Endless Peace".

My pictures of the tomb show it in context, so you can get a bit of a sense of how exotic, how DIFFERENT it looks from it's surroundings. No big fuss is made about it- one sign from the main road indicates the "tombe de facteur" and it is mentioned in the literature handed out at the Palais. The facteur died in 1924 at the age of 88.

This was so moving, so fun, so grand in scope!
It's hard to put into words what it meant to spend time there, to be near the Palais in total tranquility....