Château de Versailles in the context of "Ministry of Culture (France)"

René-Antoine Houasse (c. 1645–1710) was a decorative French painter.

He was a pupil of Charles Le Brun, under whose direction he worked at the Manufacture des Gobelins, and with whom he worked on the decoration of the Château de Versailles. He was the director of the French Academy in Rome from 1699 to 1704.

Versailles (/vɛərˈsaɪ, vɜːrˈsaɪ/ vair-SY, vur-SY, French: [vɛʁsɑj] ) is a commune in the department of the Yvelines, Île-de-France, known worldwide for the Château de Versailles and the gardens of Versailles, which is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Located in the western suburbs of the French capital, 17.1 km (10.6 mi) from the centre of Paris, Versailles is a wealthy suburb of Paris with a service-based economy and is a major tourist destination. According to the 2017 census, the population of the city is 85,862, down from a peak of 94,145 in 1975.

A new town founded by order of King Louis XIV, Versailles was the de facto capital of the Kingdom of France for over a century, from 1682 to 1789, before becoming the cradle of the French Revolution. After having lost its status as a royal city, it became the préfecture (regional capital) of the Seine-et-Oise département in 1790, then of Yvelines in 1968. It is also a Roman Catholic diocese.

François Couperin (French: [fʁɑ̃swa kupʁɛ̃]; 10 November 1668 – 11 September 1733) was a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist. He was known as Couperin le Grand ("Couperin the Great") to distinguish him from other members of the musically talented Couperin family.

The temple de l'Amour (English: Temple of Love) is a garden folly of the Château de Versailles, and more specifically, in the Petit Trianon part of it. In the temple there is an angel which represents cupido (the lovemaker). This is one of the works of Richard Mique.

The Hameau de la Reine (French pronunciation: [amo də la ʁɛn], The Queen's Hamlet) is a rustic retreat in the park of the Château de Versailles built for Marie Antoinette in 1783 near the Petit Trianon in Yvelines, France. It served as a private meeting place for the queen and her closest friends and as a place of leisure. Designed by Richard Mique, the queen's favoured architect, with the help of the painter Hubert Robert, it contained a meadowland with a lake and various buildings in a rustic or vernacular style, inspired by Norman or Flemish design, situated around an irregular pond fed by a stream that turned a mill wheel. The building scheme included a farmhouse, (the farm was to produce milk and eggs for the queen), a dairy, a dovecote, a boudoir, a barn that burned down during the French Revolution, a mill and a tower in the form of a lighthouse. Each building is decorated with a garden, an orchard or a flower garden. The largest and most famous of these houses is the "Queen's House", connected to the Billiard house by a wooden gallery, at the center of the village. A working farm was close to the idyllic, fantasy-like setting of the Queen's Hamlet.

The hameau is the best-known of a series of rustic garden constructions built in this era, notably the Prince of Condé's Hameau de Chantilly (1774–1775) which was the inspiration for the Versailles hamlet. Such model farms, operating under principles espoused by the Physiocrats, were fashionable among the French aristocracy at the time. One primary purpose of the hameau was to add to the ambiance of the Petit Trianon, giving the illusion that it was deep in the countryside rather than within the confines of Versailles. The rooms at the hameau allowed for more intimacy than the grand salons at Versailles or at the Petit Trianon.

Charles-Philippe Larivière (28 September 1798 in Paris – 29 February 1876 in Paris) was a French academic painter and lithographer.

The Versailles Orangerie (French: L'orangerie du château de Versailles) was built by Jules Hardouin-Mansart between 1684 and 1686, before work on the Château de Versailles had even begun. The Orangerie, which replaced Louis Le Vau's earlier design from 1663, is an example of many such prestigious extensions of grand gardens in Europe designed both to shelter tender plants and impress visitors. With the addition of the Orangerie, the gardens, no longer reserved solely for use by Louis XIV, had the added use of a theatrical setting that could be used to entertain guests at court.

In the winter, the Versailles Orangerie houses more than a thousand trees in boxes. In previous centuries, in winter, the trees were housed in a cathedral-like space, and during the coldest months, the gardeners would burn fires to heat the housing of the trees. In 1689 gardener Valentin Lopin created a device to transport and move the large orange trees.