Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the House & Home myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.The small town of Hauterives in south-eastern France is an unexpected stop on the international tourist circuit. Between 1879 and 1912, its former postman, Ferdinand Cheval, constructed a 26-metre-long, 12-metre-high “temple of nature” in his vegetable garden — an endeavour he claimed took “10,000 days, 93,000 hours and 33 years of hardship”. The leading work of naive or “outsider” architecture in France, and a monument to the artistic ambitions of a self-described peasant, the “Ideal Palace of Postman Cheval” has gained the admiration of generations of artists and writers. Cheval was born into a farming family in the nearby town of Charmes-sur-l’Herbasse in 1836. He attended school until the age of 12, before training as a baker’s apprentice. But from 1867, he was employed at Hauterives as a postman and would serve in this office for the next 29 years, each day covering up to 43km on foot. It was on one such trek in 1879 that he stumbled upon an unusually shaped sandstone, sculpted by wind and water over millennia. This inspired him to embark on a quixotic project, initially called “The Source of Life”, envisaged as an ensemble of fountains, using stones collected in his wheelbarrow. Every evening and all day on Sundays, alone and often by candlelight, he evolved the structure using lime, shells, cement and iron supports. The result was an extraordinary creation that combines elements of the marvellous, the mystical and the grotesque. With deep, kneaded textures, in parts it resembles a plant gone mad or a giant, deformed pastry — it is clear that “this is the work of a baker”, says Frédéric Legros, director of the site. Using simple workman’s tools, Cheval conjured a work that blurs the boundary between fantasy and reality: a marine monster has both tentacles and a woman’s head; a gargoyle sports a dragon’s maw. All my ideas come to me in dreams and when I work, my dreams are always present in my mindCheval never travelled farther than Lyon, or saw the sea. Instead, he educated himself, feeding his imagination with popular illustrated magazines such as Magasin Pittoresque. He endowed his “palace” with a wealth of animals, human figures and exotic buildings, including a Swiss chalet, a Hindu temple, a mosque and a medieval castle. The elongated bodies of his three “giants” — Roman emperor Julius Caesar, Gallic king Vercingetorix and ancient Greek scientist Archimedes — stretch up the side of the east facade. “All my ideas come to me in dreams,” he once said, “and when I work, my dreams are always present in my mind.” The building is also covered in inscriptions on little plaques set into the stone, which, given Cheval’s métier, seem to resemble envelopes with addresses, copied out painstakingly in his neat handwriting. Some, including an ode to the wheelbarrow, his “faithful companion”, were composed by him, others by friends and admirers. “Ton idéal, ton Palais” by Emile Roux Parassac, a panegyric in praise of Cheval and his work, gave the monument its name.Even during Cheval’s lifetime, the Palais attracted visitors but its reception in the world of high culture began in the 1930s, when luminaries such as Pablo Picasso, Dora Maar, Max Ernst, Paul Éluard and André Breton made the trip there. The Surrealists refashioned him in their own image as an “anarchist”, says Legros. But in fact, “he was a public servant . . . he hoped to welcome the president to his building”. That didn’t happen but, in 1969, the French culture minister André Malraux persuaded the National Assembly to grant the Palais the status of a historic monument. Today, Cheval’s magnum opus — with its roots in world myth and history, its freshness and unfettered individualism — continues to astonish its some 270,000 visitors a year. facteurcheval.comFind out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
