In addition to painting the gardens at Château de Méréville, Hubert Robert was also one of two artists responsible for the French estate’s landscape design. Planned to combine the naturalism of English landscape design with Chinese and other exotic elements, the gardens were a complete break from the symmetry and geometry of traditional landscape architecture. Over the period of a decade marshes were drained, a mountain was moved, and a river was rerouted into a sinuous, winding course in order to create this idealized romantic ruin.