Philippe de La Guêpière

(Pierre Louis) Philippe de La Guêpière (c. 1715 – 30 October 1773) was an 18th-century French architect whose main commissions were from Karl Eugen, Duke of Württemberg. Philippe was born in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, south of Paris, the son of Lucien de La Guêpière, clerk of the works at the château de Sceaux, where the architect employed by Louis XIV's natural son, the duc du Maine, had been his uncle, Jacques de La Guêpière (1670–1734). Apparently having followed the architectural courses of the theoretician Jacques-François Blondel, from the 1730s La Guêpière took courses in architecture in Paris. He attended the Académie royale d'architecture. In 1750 he issued his engraved folio volume Plans, coupes et élévations de différents palais et églises. That same year Leopoldo Retti, who was engaged in building the Neues Schloss in Stuttgart for Karl Eugen, made an artistic reconnoitering trip to Paris, in the company of the duke's garden designer Hemmerling. In Paris he oversaw the engraving of a suite of four folio sheets of the floorplan, section, elevations and profiles of the schloss that was being built. In Paris he may have encountered La Guêpière. At any rate, in 1752 Karl Eugen named La Guêpière architect to his court of Württemberg, to fill the post left empty by the unexpected death of Retti, in September the previous year. La Guêpière was one of the group of French-trained architects, like François de Cuvilliés in Munich, who brought the latest French style to the small German courts. He was occupied with works at the ducal Residenz of Stuttgart, the Neues Schloss that was built adjacent to the former palace , and also at that of Karlsruhe. He was also responsible for the palatial retreat Schloss Solitude near Stuttgart and the waterside Schloss of Monrepos in the grounds of Ludwigsburg (1760–64). At Stuttgart La Guêpière lost little time in engraving and publishing further designs. His Recueil de différens projets d’architecture représentant plusieurs monuments publics et autres (Stuttgart, Jean Nicolas Stoll) was published on 11 December 1752.