Dame Rosalind Savill Memorial Lecture 2026

The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle: Piecing together Louis XIV’s Grande Galerie Savonnerie carpets

Watch online: This talk will also be broadcast live from the museum via Zoom. Online ticketholders will be emailed a link to join 24 hours in advance. Ticketholders will also receive a link to view a recording of the talk, which will be available for two weeks.

Take part at the museum: Join us at the museum for this special talk, followed by a drinks reception until 20.45.

In 1668, Louis XIV commissioned 92 enormous Savonnerie carpets to cover the full length of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, an interior six times the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Woven over 25 years, the carpets were never laid out in the space for which they were intended. After the French Revolution, many carpets were stripped of their royal emblems, segmented, sold and dispersed – turning the royal carpet series into a gigantic jigsaw puzzle, which curators from the Mobilier national and The Met are piecing together, carpet by carpet, fragment by fragment. In February 2026, to showcase their findings, the Mobilier national rolled out 32 Grande Galerie carpets at the Grand Palais in Paris. Never in their 350-year history have so many of those carpets been shown together in one space; and from September 2026, The Met will show its own special display about the Sun King’s carpets, in the first ever exhibition devoted to the Savonnerie in the United States.

Join Wolf Burchard, Curator in Charge of the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as he reveals the collaborative story behind two recent exhibitions about Louis XIV’s legendary Grande Galerie Savonnerie carpets.

Dame Rosalind Savill was Director of the Wallace Collection from 1992 to 2011. With great energy and tenacity, she brought vital change to the museum, transforming it from an under visited institution into a cultural landmark. In memory of Dame Rosalind’s profound contribution to the study of French decorative arts – and in the spirit of her passion for sharing her knowledge with the public – the annual Dame Rosalind Savill Memorial Lecture enables a leading scholar to share new insights into the world of 18th-century French arts and culture and the history of collecting.