Louis XIV’s Savonnerie Carpets: “Stages of Power” Revisited

A Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture by Wolf Burchard (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)

In February 2018 Wolf Burchard delivered a Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture entitled “Stages of Power,” which explored the history of the Savonnerie carpet manufactory. This fall he will return to BGC for an update on his ongoing research on the subject. In 2023 Burchard joined forces with Emmanuelle Federspiel and Antonin Macé de Lepinay of the Mobilier national in Paris. Together, they curated Le Trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil (Grand Palais, Paris, 2026), an exhibition that showcased thirty-two of the ninety-two Savonnerie carpets made in the late seventeenth century to cover the full span of the Grande Galerie of the Palais du Louvre. The three curators are now in the throes of writing a comprehensive catalogue of all 115 Savonnerie carpets woven for the Grande Galerie and Galerie d’Apollon. Together with Met curator Elizabeth Cleland, Burchard also curated A King’s Carpet: Louis XIV and the Savonnerie (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2028), the first exhibition devoted to the French royal carpet manufacturer in the United States. Building on his last lecture on the Savonnerie at BGC, Burchard will return to notions of royal carpets as stages of power, their use during the Ancien régime and the French Revolution, as well as the heydays of the Rothschilds and America’s Gilded Age robber barons.

$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC members

Image: Le Trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil, Grand Palais, Paris, February 1–8, 2026.