Mollet. Family of French artists and garden-designers. Jacques (fl. 1580s and 1590s) worked with Dupérac at the Château of Anet, and has been credited with the creation of the first parterre de broderie there (1580s) although Boyceau remains a strong candidate for that distinction. Jacques's son, Claude (c.1564–c.1649) worked at Anet, Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Monceau-en-Brie, and the Tuileries, Paris, but also left numerous designs for gardens published after his death as Théâtre des plans et jardinages (1652). Several of his designs were also published in Olivier de Serres's (1539–1619) Théâtre d'agriculture et mesnage des champs (1600), and these were laid out with assistance from his sons, including Pierre (d. 1659) and André (d.1665—whose treatise, Le Jardin de plaisir (1651) also came out in German and Swedish, with an English edition in 1670, thereby publicizing French formal gardens over a wide area). André designed gardens in England (e.g. Wimbledon House and St James's Palace (1630s and 1640s), The Netherlands (e.g. Honselaarsdijk (1633–5) ) and Sweden (e.g. the King's Garden, Royal Palace, Stockholm (1646–52) ). With his brother Charles (fl. 1600–93), he laid out gardens for King Charles II (reigned 1660–85) of Great Britain and Ireland at St James's Park, London, and Hampton Court Palace. André's insistence that shrubs and trees could be planted in an architectural way, and that there should be visual harmony between a building, its gardens, and subsidiary structures, had a great influence on André Le Nôtre, son of one of Claude Mollet's assistants.

Bibliography

Hazlehurst (ed.) (1974);
K. Woodbridge (1986)