‘Palais Idéal’: The outstanding French castle made by a postman
In the small village of Hauterives, at the heart of the Drôme hills, southeast of Lyon, is an unlikely artistic marvel. You wouldn’t suppose that this tiny area of France attracts an abundance of tourists, as it’s a fairly ordinary place. However, thanks to The Postman’s Palace, it now draws around 300,000 visitors from across the world.
Originally conceived as the Palais Idéal, this hand-made castle encrusted with fossils, stones and shells was the work of Ferdinand Cheval, a local postman who worked in the area in the 1800s.
How could a postman build a castle, you might ask? On his 30-mile daily route, Cheval, inspired by a dream, began collecting stones he found to be of interesting shapes and textures along the way. At night, only guided by the light of an oil lamp, he began to slowly build a castle dedicated to worshipping nature and his ill daughter.
“Nature is willing to do the sculpture; I will do the masonry and the architecture,” he once said. Indeed, the castle looks like it has sprung from the ground. The best way to describe it is an enormous golden sand castle with elements that recall the organicity and naturalism of the gothic style.
It is incredibly intricate, which is what makes it extraordinary, as Cheval wasn’t a traditional artist. Covered in different textures that recall the scaliness of snakeskin and the smoothness of polished stone, the castle contains elements inspired by Hindu temples, medieval castles, mosques and Egyptian tombs. It is an amalgamation of all things Cheval found fascinating about history, nature and architecture from the books and postcards he had read and seen.
The combination of such opposing styles adds to its dreamlike and surrealist quality, reminding one of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia, which then inspired multiple surrealist artists like André Breton and Max Ernst. Finally, in 1912, Cheval finished the palace after 33 years of tireless efforts.
In recent times, it has become known as The Postman’s Palace and an example of ‘outsider art’, but this exact label and name has been called into question. The art world, particularly in Europe, has always been obsessed with naming and categorising. In some ways, this has been a way to organise art movements and genres so they can be identified more easily and studied accordingly. However, labelling has caused problems that critics still aim to unpack and challenge today.
‘Outsider art’ became a genre in itself to refer to artworks made by people who weren’t conventionally viewed as artists. The genre has also fallen under the terms of ‘art brut’ and ‘naïve art’, but one cannot help but identify the negative connotations associated with these terms. Just the word ‘naïve’ refers to a child-like simplicity, little artistic skill, and, therefore, automatically inferior. In fact, many artworks considered to be part of this category are often described as craft or products of good draughtsmanship rather than art, as if art is a hierarchical concept where artworks cannot all feature on the same plane.
The term outsider, too, automatically excludes Cheval from the ilk of the superior and more talented traditional artists of the time. Renaming his castle to The Postman’s Palace is a constant reminder that he wasn’t an artist but just a postman attempting to make art, pigeonholing him into a separate category.
As much as The Postman’s Palace can be admired for its beauty and Cheval’s skill, it serves as a reminder to constantly question the artistic norms that envelop us, which must be challenged. Who decides when someone becomes an artist or what constitutes art?
