Photographers in Fontainebleau & Vaux-le-Vicomte

Fontainebleau is an hour south of Paris and does the thing Versailles cannot: grandeur without the queue. Every ruler from the twelfth century to Napoleon III added to the château, so it is a sprawl of courtyards rather than one facade, and the frame that matters is the Escalier en fer à cheval — the horseshoe staircase of 1634 curving down in two arms into the Cour du Cheval Blanc, the courtyard where Napoleon said goodbye to his guard before Elba. The gardens run behind it and are free to walk: the Jardin de Diane with its bronze fountain and old plane trees, Le Nôtre's Grand Parterre, the carp pond with its little island pavilion, and the Grand Canal, dug in 1609 and older than the one at Versailles, with rowing boats on the water in summer. Around all of it is the forest — twenty-five thousand hectares of oak, pine and sandstone, and the boulders are the surprise: the Gorges d'Apremont and the Trois Pignons are fields of grey rock in open heath, painted by the Barbizon school before anyone climbed on them, and completely unlike anything else within reach of Paris. Twenty minutes north, Vaux-le-Vicomte closes the location: Le Vau, Le Brun and Le Nôtre working together for the first time, a domed façade above a moat and two kilometres of parterres running away behind it — the rehearsal for Versailles, and still privately owned. Both estates are ticketed and set their own rules for professional shoots, and Vaux opens on a seasonal calendar rather than year-round, so check the dates and the conditions before a session is booked inside either gate.