In 1879, a postman in Southern France, Ferdinand Cheval, picked up a stone somewhere along his route and made a decision to build a castle. He had no training at all.
"I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few meters away, I wanted to know the cause. In a dream I had built a palace, a castle or caves, I cannot express it well... I told no one about it for fear of being ridiculed and I felt ridiculous myself. Then fifteen years later, when I had almost forgotten my dream, when I wasn't thinking of it at all, my foot reminded me of it. My foot tripped on a stone that almost made me fall. I wanted to know what it was... It was a stone of such a strange shape that I put it in my pocket to admire it at my ease. The next day, I went back to the same place. I found more stones, even more beautiful, I gathered them together on the spot and was overcome with delight... It's a sandstone shaped by water and hardened by the power of time. It becomes as hard as pebbles. It represents a sculpture so strange that it is impossible for man to imitate, it represents any kind of animal, any kind of caricature."
"I said to myself: since Nature is willing to do the sculpture, I will do the masonry and the architecture." ( Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds)
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| The non-offending first stone |
He carried stones in his pockets, then began to use a wheelbarrow on his route, picking up whatever caught his eye.
The castle is 85 feet long and stretches from 26-32 feet high.
"You start wondering," the facteur wrote, "if you have not been carried away into a fantastic dream with boundaries beyond the scope of imagination."" (New York Times, Mary Blume, May 3, 2007)
He ignored ridicule; he ignored the fact that he had no training. He dreamt of building a palace, and so he did. Stone by stone. It took him 33 years.
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| Via Wikipedia |
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