Louis XIV’s Savonnerie Carpets: The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle

Please join AFA as we welcome DR. WOLF BURCHARD, Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, as the esteemed speaker for the TRACEY L. ALBAINY MEMORIAL LECTURE, co-sponsored by the American Friends of Attingham and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts.

Louis XIV’s Savonnerie carpets woven for the Galerie d’Apollon and Grande Galerie of the Louvre remain one of the most ambitious and enigmatic masterpieces of the Baroque. Their commission must qualify as the largest and most sophisticated of its kind, a unique chapter in the history of art that deserves to be better known. “The King’s Carpet” (le tapis du roi) was an enormous rug made up of 92 individual pieces that were intended to cover the entire span of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, six times the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Despite the monumental expense and energy lavished on this spectacular royal commission, Louis XIV appears never to have used the carpets.

With time, the notion of “one” carpet was forgotten and individual pieces given away as diplomatic gifts, or used in other royal and later presidential residences, sometimes sewn together as wall-to-wall carpeting. After the French Revolution, many carpets were stripped of their royal emblems, others sold, finding their way into the distinguished homes of English and American collectors, most notably the Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, and Wrightsmans. The altered and dispersed carpets thus became an enormous jigsaw puzzle, which Emmanuelle Federspiel and Antonin Macé de Lepinay of the Mobilier national in Paris, and Wolf Burchard of The Met in New York, are reconstructing carpet by carpet, fragment by fragment, for a forthcoming monograph.

The American Friends of Attingham is delighted to welcome the public to this complimentary program. Tickets should be reserved in advance via Eventbrite.