Ode to the Mediterranean

Though his great uncle had certainly attracted notice for his brilliant career – his grandfather’s brother was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte – Ferdinand Bac (1859-1952) was the opposite of a careerist, guided instead by a penchant for socializing and high society. Whether pursuing drawing and illustration or writing travel books disguised as novels, the label of dilettante, for him, was a mark of nobility. In his later years, after he had abandoned Paris and established himself full-time on the Côte d’Azur, Bac discovered a delightful new pursuit: designing places, homes, and gardens. Near the border between France and Italy, in the hills overlooking Menton, the estate known as Les Colombières is the legacy of a happy man, an Ode to the Mediterranean written by a “devout gardener,” as he liked to sign his letters in his golden years. Silvery olive trees and columnar cypresses frame glimpses of the landscape from the mountains to the sea, a celebration of the South, its light and its art, and the result, as Bac himself wrote, of a “simplification of forms” that stretched “from Homer to Palladio.”