Lequeu here envisaged a “satyr island” with a secluded fish pond surrounded by a topiary enclosure in a “moresque and arabesque” style. The statues at center depict the goddess Aurora restraining the young hunter Cephalus. While in Ovid’s Metamorphoses Cephalus resists the goddess’s embrace and remains faithful to his wife, Lequeu reinvented the tale, recounting that the “chaste Cephalus” was forced by his “corruptress” to “salute [Aurora] each day with harmonious sounds.”

These three studies explore the architecture of isolation. At upper left, a gate to an anchorite hermitage is composed of a tangle of dead branches, forming an effective barrier to the outside world; at upper right, a vide-bouteille—a pavilion for drinking and outdoor gatherings—is set in a remote location at high altitude. At bottom, a belvedere, or building designed for gazing at a beautiful view, sits at the edge of a cliff. Asymmetrical yet perfectly balanced, the belvedere combines elements of a classical temple, a medieval fortress, and a Renaissance villa. Once inside, a visitor could admire the view through a telescope or one of the curiously shaped windows.

This design for a pastoral temple devoted to Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture and the harvest, idealizes rural life. The structure, a curious combination of stone and foliage, is approached through fields of wheat, emphasizing the carved motto “True happiness is found in the countryside.” Inscriptions on the plaques in the canopy of the temple follow the republican calendar. Below, Lequeu transcribed several quotations, including “Work is often the father of pleasure,” from Voltaire’s Upon Moderation in All Things, Study, Ambition, and Pleasure (1738).

Ever pragmatic, Lequeu included designs for a comprehensive sewage system and a mechanism to distribute water in his depiction of a Moorish pleasure palace. Inside the tower, the wind would lash a stretched canvas, moving a vertical chain that carries a bucket of water from the moat to a channel, which would distribute the water through the structure. At
right, Lequeu added a recently invented lightning rod to protect the building.

Even toward the end of his life, Lequeu continued
to pursue opportunities to show his drawings. In 1821, he submitted these two designs to a competition preceding the baptism of the duc de Bordeaux, grandson of the future King Charles X, planned for May at Notre-Dame de Paris. In the freestanding altar at left, the lamb is a symbol of life, while in the font the same animal symbolizes death through sacrifice.
Lequeu’s design also connects the water of eternal life and the bloodshed of the “artisan from Nazareth.” The altar’s tympanum is ornamented discreetly with the instruments of the Passion, while the apse above the font is crowned with stags’ heads, evoking Psalm 42: “As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God."

In the upper design, Lequeu began with the outline of a Cantonese house that he derived from the Scotsman Sir William Chambers’s 1757 treatise on Chinese architecture. He then enriched the facade with ornament of his own invention, including pseudo- Chinese inscriptions, bells, and animal-headed scrolls atop the cornices. The open-air pavilion on the second story is devoted to the rising sun and features a gabled roof decorated—somewhat unexpectedly—with turbaned heads. The lower design on the sheet features a two-story terrace along a riverbank that forms a spectacular gallery of waterspouts, which is flanked by two donjons crowned with tents.

Lequeu combined disparate traditions in this design of a pagoda crowned with a minaret. The exterior was to be coated in a mixture of lime, sugar, and milk and then polished to create a glittering effect. While the design reflects Lequeu’s idea of Indian Mughal architecture and reveals his curiosity about other cultures, the language used to describe the building is indebted to classical theory.


At the top of the sheet, the artist included three tomb designs. The tomb at right bears a mysterious epitaph: “There she rests among two rival
lovers, separated.”

Lequeu had an enduring enthusiasm for theater. He wrote at least nine plays (now lost) with such satirical titles as The Man with Two Wives, Nadir the Great, and The False Dmitry, Tsar of Russia. He also produced a number of designs for theaters and stage sets. This design for an auditorium shows five tiers of loges, box seats, and galleries. The restricted depth of the galleries to only three rows of seats, as indicated by the plan at bottom, produces a contrast with the soaring verticality of the entire structure.

Lequeu tested the limits of architectural symbolism in these two designs where form follows function. The barn below is in the shape of a cow draped in a gold- and silver-studded Indian blanket. Its monumentalism and exotic connotations evoke the colossal plaster-and- wood elephant erected in the Place de la Bastille in Paris in 1813. The upper design depicts an entrance to a princely hunting reserve decorated with the heads of wild boar, deer, and hounds. It was intended to be sculpted in “pork stone,” a mix of limestone and sulfur that, according to the artist, diffused “an odor of cat urine . . . [or] rotten egg.”

Lequeu’s design for a dairy barn is filled with bovine references: the columns sprout udders and are topped with cow’s heads, and a butter churn sits atop the spire. The exterior announces the building’s purpose in a direct and amusing way. More understated in comparison, the chicken coop is surmounted by a metal dome, meant to reflect sunlight, whose rounded curve resembles an egg—with the figure of a chicken at
its summit.

In 1802, Lequeu was reassigned to an office responsible for cartography in the department of the interior, where he would spend years shifting between positions as a geographical draftsman. Among his responsibilities were new maps of Paris, which were necessitated by Napoleon’s reorganization of the city. In this drawing, produced around the same time, Lequeu indulged in the opposite of documenting the urban fabric: he created a bird’s-eye view of an imaginary landscape with a sinuous river and undulating topography. The artist curiously “signed” the drawing with the playing card at lower left, which contains a pun on the sound of his name: The Heart, or Le Cœur.

Situated between the military grounds of a royal city and a fortified encampment for elite troops, this island offers a quiet place for repose. Rising from the waters, a series of monumental terraces houses a menagerie of wild animals and birds in cages or in the surrounding woods. Lequeu painstakingly enumerated the many creatures in a series of lists. The island is surmounted by a temple of white stone paved in red jasper, which, as Lequeu notes, emits a rosy glow in daylight—an effect the artist had read about in an early eighteenth-century description of a castle in Ankara, Turkey.

An example of Lequeu’s fascination with ritual spaces, this sheet depicts a temple that would have served as the locus for the initiation of ancient Greek priests. A flaming river feeds into the temple, producing the billowing smoke at center, while Y-shaped divining rods, alluding to the mysteries known only to adepts, adorn the pillars flanking the entrance. To counter the sulfurous odor of the river, the sanctuary would emit an aromatic perfume—the recipe for which Lequeu includes—whose sweet vapor evoked dreams.

The present sheet invites the viewer into the “marvelous” dwelling of a group of mythological water nymphs. This three-story cavern, illuminated by an oculus, forms a microenvironment replete with water jets, singing birds, and plants growing on compost. A surrounding aqueduct supplies the water for the monumental cascade. Lequeu’s annotations note that the grotto, half-disguised as an artificial mound above ground, was to be situated at the end of a cloister and in front of a labyrinth, an elaborate and entirely imaginary setting.

Freemasonry was a prominent cultural movement in the France of Lequeu’s day. While he seems to have been part of the brotherhood and knew the secretive Masonic initiation rites, it is not known to which lodge he belonged.


This structure, located behind a temple devoted to Minerva (seated at right), is designed for initiations into the “Society of Sages and Most Courageous Men.” According to Lequeu’s annotations, the ritual to join the brotherhood required initiates to overcome their fear of death through trials by fire, water, and air in
subterranean chambers before emerging into the light. Each chamber would be equipped with complex mechanisms meant to produce claps of thunder.

For this depiction of a grotto in the gardens of Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, Lequeu turned to Ovid’s tale of the nymph Arethusa. She was transformed into a spring to elude being raped by the river god Alephus; the god, in turn, transformed himself into a river to follow her further. Here, Alephus is represented as the cascade at left, and the waters mingle in a cavern whose oculus Lequeu’s inscription refers to as an orifice. The figure of the nymph recalls a description in the erotic Renaissance novel The Dream of Poliphilo. Lequeu owned the 1804 edition of the text.


At upper right, Lequeu envisioned his own tomb, containing his “cadaver embalmed in bitumen.” The sepulchre is surmounted by the instruments of Lequeu’s profession as an architectural draftsman, including a compass, rulers, and porte-crayon. Beneath the flap of paper on which the tomb is drawn, however, is an alternative design bearing a Greek cross—an echo of Lequeu’s bitter remark that he carried the cross his entire life.