Pierre Gaspard Marie Grimod d'Orsay (14 December 1748 – 3 January 1809, Vienna), comte d'Orsay, was a collector of sculptures, paintings and drawings (which were seized by the government in 1793 and donated to the Louvre).
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Early life
He was the only son of the "fermier général" Pierre Grimaud du Fort (1692–1748) and his wife, Marie Antoinette Felicité de Caulaincourt (b. 1731), daughter of Louis Armand de Caulaincourt, Marquis de Caulaincourt (1690–1734).
Biography
In 1766, 18 years after his father's death, he reached his majority and assumed control of his enormous inheritance from his father, making him one of the richest men of his day. Work on the gardens of the family chateau at Orsay, begun by his father and continued by Pierre Gaspard's guardians, including, in 1758, extensive work under the direction of the talented architect Jean-Michel Chevotet (1698–1772), who had won the Prix de Rome in 1722 and was admitted to the Royal Academy of Architecture in Paris in 1732. When the ambitious garden scheme was completed on 1 August 1764, two years before his majority, an inventory of the d'Orsay family holdings declared:
"The greatest artists and a large number of workers have changed the face of nature which was not agreeable near the chateau, and created a park that may be considered one of the most beautiful of the environs of Paris. . .especially for its beautiful plants, terraces, and the large quantities of water distributed via a superb canal and in basins of every form."[1]