Ferdinand Cheval

Ferdinand Cheval (; 19 April 1836 – 19 August 1924), often nicknamed Facteur Cheval ("Mail Carrier Cheval") was a French mail carrier who spent 33 years building Le Palais idéal (the "Ideal Palace") in Hauterives, in southeastern France. It is regarded as an extraordinary example of naïve art architecture.

Origins Cheval was born in Charmes-sur-l'Herbasse to a poor farming family. He left school at age 13 to become a baker's apprentice, but eventually became a mail carrier. Her dowry included the land on which the Palais Idéal stands today. He reported:

"I was walking very fast when my foot caught on something that sent me stumbling a few metres away, I wanted to know the cause. [Previously, 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 leisure.

"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."

For the next 33 years, Cheval picked up stones during his daily mail rounds and carried them home to build the Palais idéal.

Three giant stones, each with doll-like faces, standing about 10.5 metres high, serve not only as decoration but as a support system for the Barbary Tower, with a line of cement swans leading up to a spiral staircase. His work is commemorated in an essay by Anaïs Nin. In 1932, the German artist Max Ernst created a collage titled The Postman Cheval. The collage belongs to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection and is on display there. In 1958, Ado Kyrou produced Le Palais idéal, a short film about Cheval's palace.

After admiring Cheval's work, Picasso created a series of drawings telling a narrative, in a cartoon fashion, which is now recognized as Facteur Cheval sketchbook in 1937. Picasso drew him as a twisted, hybrid-like creature (or beast), carved with the initials of the French postal service (P.T.T.) on his skin, dressed in typical postman's attire, holding masonry tools and a letter. The creature was standing in front of his creation. In the drawing, Picasso took a humorous route, sketching Cheval's body in the shape of a horse and his head as a bird. Picasso did this to make of pun on Cheval's name and career, given birds are messengers (as Cheval was a postman) and Cheval means horse in French.

In 2018 Will Varley included the song "The Postman" about Cheval and the Palais Idéal on his studio album Spirit of Minnie.

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