The Marly Machine on the Seine

The artwork

On the left, halfway down the sheet, beside the aqueduct, a label reads “Maison de Mr de Ville”: it is the house Louis XIV gave to the man who had proposed this machine to him. You receive it printed on handmade Amalfi paper, in a handmade frame.

• The Marly Machine in cross-section, piece by piece, and the hill up to Saint-Germain.
• In an engineer's study the gears catch the eye.
• A gift for anyone who loves Versailles or wants to see how a machine works.

Arnold de Ville, from Liège, proposed bringing the water of the Seine to the top of the hill, for the king's gardens. The machine was built by a carpenter from the same region, Rennequin Sualem. On 13 June 1684 Louis XIV watched the trial: fourteen wheels 12 metres across drove more than 200 pumps and pushed the water over 150 metres uphill. It ran day and night, with a tremendous racket, until 1817. In 1769 de Ville's house went to Madame du Barry, a gift from Louis XV; Sualem, who kept the machine running until his death in 1708, got a memorial plaque at Bougival that reads “seul inventeur”: the sole inventor.

The plate comes from the Atlas Curieux of Nicolas de Fer, who published it in 1716. At the top is the cross-section, the “Coupe de la Machine de Marly”, with a key from 1 to 15 for every part and the piles driven into the riverbed; on the right there are even gratings against the ice. At the bottom, the “Veue generale”: the hillside with its reservoirs and the rows of rocking beams that carried the motion up the slope; on the horizon, the château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. The copy reproduced here belongs to the David Rumsey Map Collection.

It looks right in an engineer's study and is a gift for anyone who loves Versailles, or who never passes a gearwheel without stopping to see how it turns. Up there by the aqueduct, Monsieur de Ville's house keeps an eye on Sualem's wheels.

Unique quality material

Print on handmade Amalfi paper
Sheet size: 29 x 42 cm (11.4 x 16.5 in)
With frame: 31 x 44 cm (12.2 x 17.3 in)
Material: artwork printed on very fine handmade Amalfi paper with deckled edges
Frame: dark brown with gold fillet, handmade, with glass