Street-side garden

Architecture

The street-side garden unfurls alongside Rue Antoine-Bourdelle, caught between the fence and several buildings. Around 1860, the carpenter Pierre Auguste Paillard, owner of this plot, built a house, which was destroyed in 1965. The only remnants of it are the front steps, turned into a plinth for the horse of General Alvear, and an oval pool, now dried-up, adorned in its centre by the sculpture of Faun and Goats.

First construction added after the museum’s creation, the gallery punctuated by five semi-circular arches was built in 1951 by the architect Henri Gautruche. Made in reinforced concrete and covered with a red brick cladding, it is suggestive of the Occitan buildings that Bourdelle loved so much. Complemented in 1954 by a covered terrace, this gallery leads to the monumental Plaster Casts Hall. 

Upon Gautruche’s death, the architect Dominique Fenzy took over the project while staying true to his predecessor. Fenzy designed in the late 1960s an extension at a right angle, which houses the reception area, rearranged in 1989 by Christian de Portzamparc.

The austere façade on Rue Antoine-Bourdelle is reminiscent of antique fortifications. The brick-covered reinforced concrete is punctuated in its upper section by narrow windows barred by grillwork with Orientalising motifs inspired by Bourdelle’s monogram. 

Plant varieties

Along the fence in springtime, lilac, wisteria, and syringa herald the blossoming of clematis and roses. From June to November, the flowerbed of perennials blends together fennel and sage, the variegated acanthus and the red ears of persicaria, the yellow inflorescences of sedum and the pristine white of the Japanese anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’. The Indian lilac with its marbled trunk is covered in clumps of fuchsia. Euphorbia and hollyhock are invading the garden paths. The compact architecture of the cone-shaped yew trees frames the horse of Monument to General Alvear. In the shade of the fig tree and ‘Golden’ apple tree, the faun from Monument to Debussy is playing the syrinx, under the red berries of the cotoneaster. The late flowers of the heptacodium, a small tree from China, add an ornamental touch to the thicket where The Fruit is hiding her nudity, among the roses, the autumn asters, and the spiraea branches. Beneath the crawling cotoneaster, The Bather appears among a bed of erigeron and periwinkle. In April-May, peonies are the first flowers to open, between tufts of aquilegia and valerian. In the heart of the summer, the sun-like helianthus and the golden sprays of Solidago brighten up the lavender-blue nepeta – the so-called “Catmint” that attracts the felines of the neighbourhood…