The fountains that only ever ran for the king

Here is the detail about Versailles that I cannot stop thinking about. For all its gold and mirrors and endless mirrored halls, the one thing the palace never had was water. Louis XIV built it on drained marshland with no river to hand, then packed the gardens with more than fifty fountains, and there was never enough water to run them all together. There still wouldn't be today.

So they staged it. As the king walked the gardens, teams of fountaineers, mostly the Francine family who kept the waterworks running for generations, waited out of sight with whistles. A courtier up ahead would signal, and they would dash to open each fountain just as Louis arrived, then close it again the second he moved on, saving the water for the next one down the path. The Sun King went his whole life thinking every fountain in Versailles played at once, in one great continuous show. They never did. He was just followed, wherever he went, by a moving wave of water turned on a few seconds before he got there.

I painted it in watercolour and ink, the fountains catching the light with the palace behind. There's a poster with a letter home and a postcard if you'd like one.

Shop the poster here:  The Palace of Versailles, Versailles · Travel Poster