Royal rocks

Robert A. Lorenz

This 800-pound rock—known as a gogotte—was formed from the sands of France’s Fontainebleau Forest. Also known as poupées de grés or sandstone dolls, gogottes are up to 99 percent pure, white quartz. View full image

Robert A. Lorenz

This 800-pound rock—known as a gogotte—was formed from the sands of France’s Fontainebleau Forest. Also known as poupées de grés or sandstone dolls, gogottes are up to 99 percent pure, white quartz. View full image

Once there was a king who shone like the sun. He reigned from a beautiful, gilded palace with vast gardens and endless parks, embellished with fountains and waterways.

Close to one of the king’s other palaces, there were snow-white sands in the forests, with strangely shaped, smooth, rounded rocks poking out of the ground, looking like kneaded dough. The king liked these rocks so much that he had many moved to his beautiful palace to adorn its gardens and groves.

The king was Louis XIV. The beautiful palace with gardens and waterways is Versailles. The other palace in the forest with white sands and strange rocks is Fontainebleau. The Versailles fountains in the Ballroom Grove, the Enceladus Grove, and the Grove of the Three Fountains are decorated with thousands of rocks from the Fontainebleau Forest.

It wasn’t only the Sun King who became mesmerized by these strange rocks. Called gogottes (also poupées de grés, or sandstone dolls), they became part of the curiosa in collections. Museums in Europe and North America have them on display. Christie’s and Sotheby’s occasionally offer them for sale.

David Friend ’69 was also drawn in by their strangeness. When in 2015 he made a gift to the Yale Peabody Museum to create his namesake hall, he loaned the museum the spectacular, 800-pound gogotte shown here for display; two years later, the loan metamorphosed into a gift.

The sands at Fontainebleau, deposited around 30 million years ago on the shores of long-gone seas, have been used for glass making since the 1700s. Stained glass windows in cathedrals and churches across Europe were made from Fontainebleau sand. Even the glass panes in the Louvre pyramids started out as Fontainebleau sand.

The mesmerizing, strangely shaped, smooth undulating rocks raise the question of how they were formed. Surface waters draining through organic acid–enriched soil dissolved the quartz in the sands. When the infiltrating waters mixed with groundwater, the dissolved quartz precipitated as amorphous silica, “gluing” the sand. Over time, the amorphous silica recrystallized into quartz. The resulting sandstone is up to 99 percent pure, white quartz. The silica precipitation process was discontinuous, depending on water flow and many other variables. The stop-and-go cementation gave the gogottes their sculptural shape.

Quasi-continuous, parallel sandstone ridges run through the Fontainebleau Forest. A lesser-known claim to fame of the sandstones is that they are the playground of rock climbers practicing bouldering, a particular free-style type of rock climbing.
The Fontainebleau area has strong connections to the art world. The School of Fontainebleau developed during the late French Renaissance in association with the Palace of Fontainebleau. In the nineteenth century, the Barbizon School at the western end of the forest became famous in the painting world. Although not stated specifically, it could be speculated that artists at the turn of the twentieth century might have been inspired by the Fontainebleau poupées de grés.

The beautiful gogotte at the Peabody should be enjoyed as an exquisite illustration of nature’s creativity. Its shape-shifting beauty, created by the interplay of chemistry, physics, and time, is striking. One doesn’t need to think of how it formed; it is enough to be fascinated by it, as the Sun King once was.