A 43-year old postman trips on a stone on his daily rounds between two towns. Looking closely, he is startled by its form. There are layered sediments, rounded by the ancient oceans that once filled the valley. Or, so he assumes. Facteur Cheval, as the locals call him, is not a well-educated man. Yet this doesn’t prevent him from having thoughts about ‘the nature of everything’.
Cheval is a man fascinated by images. In the second half of the 19th century, foreign pictures are a valuable commodity. Lithography is still in its infancy as a form of illustration, but it is steadily shuttling cultures across borders. As a younger man, Cheval was intrigued by a depiction of an Indian palace he found in a magazine, inspiring a dream of him constructing his own impossible structure. Repressed for many years, this dream re-emerges after the stone incident. Soon he returns to the same site, gathering more stones.
The site known as the Palais Idéal consists entirely of stone pieces that Cheval found lying around, carved and fixed with mortar and lime. It sits in Hauterive, a small commune in the department of Drôme in south-east France. At 26 metres in length and up to 12 metres high, its startling, eccentric design contrasts against the inoffensive ambience of the town. Though constructed with immense skill and patience, this structure is not the work of a practised architect. Facteur Cheval was simply a man with an inquisitive mind, and a lot of determination.
As both a work of art and architecture, the Palais is an oddity. Good taste has been disregarded, conventions pick-and-mix: there are features of exotic buildings, but also forms of water-worn caves; impressions of disparate myths and religions; tributes to historical figures. Cheval has been inspired by things he has read and heard about: mediaeval castles, mosques, swiss chalets. The structure is adorned with his own quotes, the philosophy of a humble ‘peasant’ (his words), and serves almost as a cryptic memoir. The stone he tripped over serves as the blueprint: shaped by nature itself, absorbing the currents of the world.
Cheval committed to his unusual project with the encouragement and financial help of his second wife, Claire-Philomène Richaud, as well as the occasional patron or foreign visitor who had caught wind of his unique undertaking. He claims that until starting work on the structure he ‘had never touched a trowel in [his] life’. In the 33 years it took to construct, he not only had to procure 4,000 bags of cement, but transport his stones to his back garden. He would eventually settle on using a wheelbarrow — ‘my companion in suffering’ — working at night, to escape the scorn and ridicule of his neighbours. When the council told him he couldn’t be buried in his creation (on grounds of public health) he spent a further eight years building a separate mausoleum, where he rests today.
In art, ‘naive’ is a label attached to pieces whose creator lacks formal training, which as a result flout established rules of perspective, scale and palette. This lends them a childlike quality. However, the naive is not without genuine artistic intent: even if derided at the time, these works may yet be salvaged by posterity. Such was the case with Henri Rousseau, whose imaginative but oddly proportioned paintings only gained popularity after his death. Cheval’s Palais Idéal is equally discombobulating. The perspective is deceptive: some elements — the three giants — are grossly enlarged, while others — various engraved reproductions of foreign buildings — are in miniature. Each of the four sides take a different form, the consequence of Cheval’s ideas developing as he was building it. Starting with the east facade, by the time he had made it round to the north he had become more refined in the intricate details, populating its surface with a menagerie of animals in an oblique religious allegory.
There’s clearly vision here — but what about purpose? Some think that the birth of Cheval’s daughter Alice in 1879 was a key inspiration for building the Palais. Her death at age eighteen perhaps changed his motivation to memorialising her. However, it’s clear that at some point the project took a life of its own. Despite finishing an autobiography before his death in 1912, some of Cheval’s artistic motivations have been left to scholars to unpick. According to the man himself he wished to ‘bring back to life all the ancient architectures and primaeval times’. However, while the east and north facades demonstrate this eclectic style, the south and the east are more restrained, representing Cheval’s adoption of more orthodox western features as word of his project spread. If his work shows the uninhibited potential of naive art, it is also a reminder of its fragility. When naive artists become more confident, they risk becoming merely amateur mimics of established art.
On the other end of the scale we have Antoni Gaudi, whose complex building designs still evoke a playful formlessness. Unlike the Spanish architect, Cheval maintained his outsider status. The tragedy of his life — he would lose both wives and two sons besides Alice — haunts his Palais. Though now considered a national monument in France, it had endured much criticism in its early years, narrowly avoiding attempts of demolition by the town council. Only when its creator was at the end of his life did it receive recognition by a younger generation of radical artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Max Ernst, and Anais Nin. Maybe this is the purest embodiment of the importance of the journey over the destination; art not as a product, but as a process. So says one of Cheval’s inscriptions: ‘Each time you look at me, you see your life pass you by. It’s not time that passes, it is us.’
