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A Met Curator Tells the Strange Story of Louis XIV's Carpets
117 Plays2 years ago
This week we travel back to the seventeenth century, to the glorious court of the Sun King, Louis XIV, in France, and his astonishing commission for a suite of ninety-three carpets to cover the 1440-foot-long Grande Galerie at the Louvre, then a royal palace. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is now the proud owner of three of these carpets—the creative work of court painter Charles le Brun and court architect Louis Le Vau, and handiwork of the Savonnerie Manufactory—and British decorative arts curator Wolf Burchard is on hand to discuss their convoluted history and the way in which they illustrate the baroque principle of variatas: that all things artistic be constructed along similar lines, while individually being unique and exciting.
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Transcript
Introduction to Historic Carpets with Wolf Burchard
00:00:09
Speaker
Hello, and welcome to Curious Objects, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:12
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I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:14
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It's December, and it's the season for warmth and comfort and sweaters and blankets and, of course, carpets to keep our feet off of those chilly floors.
00:00:24
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And today's Curious Object is, in fact, three carpets, or maybe 93, but we'll get to that.
00:00:30
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which have just about the most prestigious provenance imaginable, namely the King of France.
00:00:35
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Now, these are, as you might imagine, less of the casual lounging on the floor type of carpet and more of the magnificent work of art category.
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And they have a really fascinating story to tell us about 18th century luxury and innovation and global trade and craftsmanship.
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Plus, they are going to reveal to us something about the Louvre Museum that
00:00:56
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might surprise you.
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And I've just realized, actually to my great surprise, that in over 80 episodes of Curious Objects, we've never once devoted a full episode to rugs or carpets.
00:01:07
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So this is long overdue.
Wolf Burchard's Background and Influences
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And boy, do I have a terrific guest to talk with us about these terrific carpets.
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His name is Wolf Burchard, and Wolf is curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
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Where he oversees British decorative arts, he curated the fabulous Walt Disney exhibition at the Met in 2021.
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He led the remarkable renovation of the British galleries there as well.
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And much, much more that we'll get into in just a moment.
00:01:35
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Wolf, welcome to Curious Objects.
00:01:38
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Well, thank you so much for having me.
00:01:40
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Now, I'm really looking forward to investigating these carpets with you, but we have some business to get to first.
00:01:46
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And of course, that means the dreaded rapid fire questions.
00:01:50
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But so some of these are actually going to be less rapid fire than usual because your own personal history is really fascinating.
00:01:57
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And I think, you know, listeners, you are really going to want to hear about this.
00:02:00
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So let's start with a few quick ones and then we'll go from there.
00:02:04
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Are you ready?
00:02:05
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I don't know if I'm ready, but well, let's give it a go.
00:02:07
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Time will tell.
00:02:08
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Okay.
00:02:10
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Wolf, what is the first object or work of art that you remember falling in love with?
00:02:15
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That is a difficult one.
00:02:16
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But if I don't want to sort of jump ahead, but when it comes to sort of falling in love and a sustained crush, I would say that the Savonry Carpets, which we will discuss, is certainly a sustained love that I've had now for many, many years.
00:02:35
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Fair enough.
00:02:36
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Okay, so the Metropolitan Museum is on fire.
00:02:40
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And you have time to grab just one piece.
00:02:43
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What are you going to rescue?
00:02:44
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Oh, my God, those are terrible questions.
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Let me think.
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You don't have much time to decide.
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I don't have much time to decide.
00:02:51
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Oh, my God.
00:02:52
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Well, I'm going to take the Paul de Lamerie tea caddies, the Met acquired two years ago.
00:02:59
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They're nice and light.
00:03:00
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I can carry them.
00:03:01
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The savonary carpets I can't carry.
00:03:03
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That's a good practical approach.
00:03:06
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And of course, you know, that's a rather appealing answer for me, having been intimately involved with those tea caddies myself.
00:03:14
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Now, Disney has decided to do a remake of Beauty and the Beast, but instead of the French Rococo setting, they've asked you, Wolf, to pick a different period and style for the new film.
00:03:26
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What are you going to choose?
00:03:31
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Well, Walter Crane set in his Victorian illustrations, set it in a Regency style interiors.
Family Ties to Bauhaus and Neoclassical Architecture
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And I thought that his illustrations were rather appealing.
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So I think one should give that a go and animate those rooms.
00:03:46
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Looking forward to that one.
00:03:48
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What's your favorite museum to visit other than the Met, of course?
00:03:52
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I don't believe in favorites, I must admit.
00:03:54
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I'm one of five children.
00:03:56
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Although my sisters would always say that I'm certainly my mother's favorite son, as I'm the only son.
00:04:02
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But at the top of my head, I must say I love the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, which is so rich and has such a
00:04:13
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superlative collection of old masters and decorative arts.
00:04:17
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So that certainly would be amongst the top choices.
00:04:23
Speaker
What one book should an amateur read about 18th century French decorative arts?
00:04:29
Speaker
I would suggest not one book, but to get into the spirit of the 18th century, I would suggest people either watch or read Kenneth Clark's Civilization and his chapter on the pursuit of happiness, which is about the Rococo in Europe and enlightened philosophy in North America.
00:04:56
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Terrific.
00:04:57
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Okay, this one is a little less rapid, perhaps.
00:05:01
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Wolf, what is your personal opinion about Bauhaus?
00:05:05
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I'm not sure I would say I have an opinion about Bauhaus, but I take a particular interest in the Bauhaus because it was founded by my great uncle, Walter Gropius, who was the brother of my great grandmother and the uncle of my grandfather.
00:05:27
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And my grandfather entertained a very close relationship with his uncle and therefore saw and witnessed the foundation of the Bauhaus and met all these extraordinary professors, Kandinsky, Feininger, etc., who worked at the Bauhaus.
00:05:46
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And they all stayed with my great-grandparents in the house in Timndorf in Germany.
Balancing Historical and Modernist Art Philosophies
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My grandmother, who of all my grandparents, was the one I got to know the best because she lived the longest.
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She died in 2008, just a couple of months short of her 100th birthday.
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She, to me, was this extraordinary person.
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gateway to the past.
00:06:11
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And so she had all these stories to share from the 1920s and 30s when she, as a very young woman, met Walter Gropius and the Bauhaus professors and that whole world.
00:06:26
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So it's something that always fascinated me because it also was, you know, he's so
00:06:33
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broke with with tradition.
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I mean, he came from a from a family of of architects, but architects of a very different kind and may, you know, sort of with that he brought his his vision to life.
00:06:46
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So that was always quite inspiring.
00:06:48
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And particularly what I always loved is this idea of all the arts being gathered in one community under one roof.
00:06:58
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So
00:07:00
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So I obviously always had a particular interest for the Bauhaus.
00:07:05
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What should everyone know about Nicolas Alexandre Saint-Lain de Montfort?
00:07:10
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Nicolas Alexandre Salamonfort was a French architect who came from Versailles and made his career in Germany after the French Revolution and built many townhouses or town palaces for the leading families of Frankfurt, all of which are now lost because the architecture of Frankfurt was lost in World War II.
00:07:34
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And this is the reason why you're asking me is he built a house, a townhouse for
00:07:39
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for my grandmother's family.
00:07:40
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So my grandmother, whom I had mentioned earlier and who I said was this great gateway to the past, she grew up in this real gem of neoclassicism, which had been built by her great-grandfather in 1804 and was designed by Salon Monfort.
00:07:55
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And
00:08:01
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And that house was destroyed also in the war in 1944.
00:08:04
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But my grandmother obviously could tell these extraordinary stories about the house, which had been built and decorated in one go in the French Ampire style.
00:08:16
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And the stories that she told about the house and the visitors, et cetera, were just – were obviously fascinating to me who grew up under very different and, you know, what we would probably say much more normal circumstances.
00:08:33
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And so to me, that was –
00:08:37
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incredibly evocative talking to my grandmother about this house in which she grew up because it made historic architecture and interiors relatable.
00:08:47
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Well, this is fascinating.
00:08:48
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And I mean, what's interesting to me, hearing you describe these two very disparate aesthetic legacies from branches of your family, one, the elegance and luxury and refinements that we associate with the sort of 18th, 19th century historic decorative arts and architecture, and the other, the spare industrial approach of the Bauhaus.
00:09:14
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How do you personally reconcile those two strains of thought?
00:09:20
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I have diverse interests like so many of us and I'm not only wedded to one particular century or a particular medium.
00:09:28
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When you're a curator or someone interested in the decorative arts, you might be interested in ceramics as you're interested in furniture and silver, sculpture, tapestries, etc.
00:09:38
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And you can see the value of different schools of thought, of different stylistic schools.
00:09:46
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And so I have no difficulty of reconciling this.
00:09:51
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My grandmother made this whole story incredibly three-dimensional, and she herself, in the 1920s and 30s, wanted to break free from the stuffy environment in which she grew up and the Bauhaus or the sort of whole…
00:10:09
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ideology or the whole world of thinking around the Bauhaus was a wonderful stage set to break free from that stuffy world.
00:10:19
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So they're both, in my mind, quite closely intertwined.
00:10:24
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And as I said, the Bauhaus...
00:10:27
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I'm absolutely no expert in either modernist architecture or modernist design, but I do take a great interest in the philosophy of the Bauhaus and the idea of bringing the arts together under one
Louis XIV's Vision and the Carpet Project
00:10:44
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roof.
00:10:44
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And as you know, the manifesto of the Bauhaus
00:10:49
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which Walter Gropius wrote had the Gothic cathedral on its cover, which again was supposed to be an illustration of bringing all the arts together under one roof.
00:11:00
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And this is something that I was interested in when doing the Disney exhibition is Walt Disney's aim to identify talent and set up his studios, giving different people different tasks, but creating different
00:11:16
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a work of art, an animated film that was made by 700, 800 people, but making it look as if it was designed and made by one single individual.
00:11:27
Speaker
And my focus on Charles Lebrun, on whom I wrote my PhD, the principal painter to do the 14th, was also another artist who was interested in
00:11:40
Speaker
or working in many, many different fields and trying to establish a visual language that you could translate from painting or painted decoration to the design of furniture, tapestries, silver, sculpture, etc.
00:11:58
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You've set up a really terrific segue for us into the second part where we're going to look at Le Brun and also at, of course, as these aforementioned carpets, which bring together all kinds of aesthetic ideas under one roof.
00:12:16
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We'll be right back with Wolf Burchard and this group of extraordinary 18th century carpets.
00:12:22
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First, just a reminder that you can see images of these carpets at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
00:12:29
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As always, I will exhort you to take a moment right now to give Curious Objects a rating and to write a review for us.
00:12:36
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Just a few words about why you enjoy listening.
00:12:38
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These are a really great way to help the podcast reach new listeners.
00:12:43
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And also, I just personally love to hear what you think.
00:12:46
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If you're listening on Apple podcast, it is extremely easy to do this.
00:12:49
Speaker
You just go to the Curious Objects show page and scroll down to where it says ratings and reviews.
00:12:54
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Tap the write a review button.
00:12:57
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Meanwhile, if you want to get in touch with me directly, you can do that by email at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or on Instagram at Objective Interest.
00:13:07
Speaker
I always love to hear from you.
00:13:13
Speaker
And with that said, let's get back to Wolf Burchard.
00:13:17
Speaker
And Wolf, I want to start with some context.
00:13:19
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So let's just stipulate this.
00:13:21
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The year is 1664.
00:13:25
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We are in Paris.
00:13:26
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The king is Louis XIV, the son king.
00:13:30
Speaker
And the Louvre is there in Paris, but it's not an art museum.
00:13:36
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What is it?
00:13:38
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No, the Louvre isn't an art museum at the time.
00:13:41
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I mean, it's filled with a pretty good art collection, and it's the headquarters of the French monarchy.
00:13:48
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So 1664, Louis XIV is 26.
00:13:52
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A very young monarch came to power three years earlier, and he became king of France at the age of five.
00:14:00
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But of course, his mother and Cardinal Mazarin were...
00:14:04
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ruling the country on his behalf.
00:14:07
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But there is this very young, very ambitious monarch who is trying to establish himself.
00:14:14
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And he has at his side a hugely intelligent and also extremely ambitious minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert.
00:14:23
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And he is going to be a key figure in establishing the image of the king and of the French monarchy within France and abroad.
00:14:34
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And their aim or Colbert's aim is to turn the Louvre.
00:14:40
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And this is no exaggeration, but he wants it to be the principal palace of the world.
00:14:46
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And so he has this great aim to turn it into this extraordinary architectural masterpiece that would be an outward expression of France sitting at the center of the world.
00:15:03
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:15:04
Speaker
Louis is, of course, famous for many things, but apparently not modesty.
00:15:08
Speaker
Not modesty, no.
00:15:10
Speaker
And one thing that frustrated Colbert's vision for the Louvre is that Louis XIV himself wasn't particularly keen on the Louvre.
00:15:20
Speaker
I mean, at the time, the Louvre was an architectural palimpsest.
00:15:26
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It started out as a medieval fortress to which, in the Renaissance, various monarchs had added wings and buildings, and it was completely engulfed by houses.
00:15:42
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You know, the sort of urban landscape of Paris.
00:15:45
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So it had very little to do with what we see today.
00:15:49
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There was a very important, huge wing, the Grande Galerie, the Long Gallery of the Louvre that connected the Louvre with the now lost Tuileries Palace.
00:16:01
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And that building is more than 400 meters long and had in the ground floor and first floors the workshops and flats of scientists, of craftsmen,
00:16:18
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etc.
00:16:19
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And then on the Piano Nobile, it had this huge, long gallery, which is more than four times the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, but comparable proportions, not in terms of the length, but the width and the height of the ceiling with the coved ceiling.
00:16:41
Speaker
And, well, and before the reign of Louis XIV, Louis XIII, as far as they had summoned Nicolas Poussin, great French painter, to come to Paris and decorate the ceiling of the Grande Galerie.
00:16:59
Speaker
And that is a slightly ridiculous chapter in the history of art because Nicolas Poussin, although he was, you know,
00:17:07
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the greatest admired artist of his time was absolutely not a decorator.
00:17:11
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He made small, highly intellectual canvases and suddenly was asked to, you know, decorate the largest interior in Paris.
00:17:25
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And so he got started and started decoration on the theme of Hercules, from which the kings of France claimed descendants.
00:17:36
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And after, I think, nine bays out of, I think, 46 bays, he said, oh, I really ought to go home to Rome and pick up my wife.
00:17:47
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And then he went back to Rome.
00:17:49
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And in the meantime, Luther XIII and Richelieu died.
00:17:54
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And so the whole thing was given up.
00:17:56
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Much to his relief, it sounds like.
00:17:58
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Much to his relief.
The Savonry Manufactory's Ambitious Undertaking
00:17:59
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Yes, absolutely.
00:18:00
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I mean, yeah, to ask Poussin to decorate this gallery just seems such a weird move.
00:18:05
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But so, you know, and then Colbert came back and they came, arrived and Louis XIV arrived and said, okay, we need to finish the decoration of this gallery.
00:18:16
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And so they decided that they were going to complete the
00:18:20
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Poussin's decoration up to one half of the gallery.
00:18:23
Speaker
And then Charles Lebrun, the king's principal painter, would then do the other half, which was a great opportunity for Lebrun to compare himself to the greatest admired or the most admired painter in France, Nicolas Poussin, who was this great role model.
00:18:41
Speaker
And then they decided to create a series of carpets for that gallery.
00:18:49
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Right.
00:18:49
Speaker
And so, and just before we get into the carpets, which again, I'm, I'm dragging this out perhaps longer than I should for the sake of our expectant listeners.
00:19:00
Speaker
But I do want to give a sense as we start to talk about these carpets of just the scale of the ambition that we're describing, because you've just, you've just given this evocative description of the sort of size and scale of the gallery.
00:19:18
Speaker
And some of these very important names who are involved in that production.
00:19:23
Speaker
But the ambition that the Louvre was going to be the center, the beating heart of France, and by extension of the world,
00:19:33
Speaker
I mean, the political stakes here are really, really tremendous.
00:19:36
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And I wonder if you can give us an idea just from an economic perspective.
00:19:41
Speaker
I mean, was that ambition justified or warranted by the economic and political situation?
00:19:47
Speaker
What exactly was the extent of Louis' power and wealth in this period?
00:19:53
Speaker
Well, I think Louis XIV is famous for projecting the image of power that then ultimately results in power.
00:20:01
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When he, you know, when at the beginning of his reign, France is in a rather dire state.
00:20:10
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And but in creating, and this is why when we talk about Louis XIV, you know, people love using the...
00:20:20
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the anachronistic term of propaganda.
00:20:22
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They were creating together, Louis XIV Colbert and the intelligentsia that surrounded Colbert were creating the image of this extremely powerful monarch.
00:20:34
Speaker
And he then sets out to start his military campaign across parts of Europe
00:20:42
Speaker
and is very successful in doing that, certainly in the first half of the reign.
00:20:46
Speaker
So he establishes himself as the most powerful monarch in Europe.
00:20:52
Speaker
And what we mustn't forget is that at that moment, if you think of other European monarchs at the time, you know, the Holy Roman Emperor,
00:21:00
Speaker
wasn't a particularly powerful monarch because he was, you know, he may have been the emperor, but his own territories were limited and his power over other German principalities too was limited.
00:21:16
Speaker
In England, you know, there had just been the Civil War.
00:21:21
Speaker
And then Charles II, after being in exile in France and the lower countries, returns to England.
00:21:27
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He too needs to try and establish himself.
00:21:30
Speaker
But there is the great question between, you know, Catholicism and Protestantism.
00:21:35
Speaker
So...
00:21:37
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Louis XIV arrives on the throne at a time when actually the soil is in his favor to establish himself as the most powerful monarch in Europe.
00:21:49
Speaker
And what is so clever is that he does that.
00:21:54
Speaker
through the arts, through architecture.
00:21:56
Speaker
He, you know, obviously then builds Versailles and builds this whole court structure that so many of his contemporaries are then going to follow in Germany, in England, in Spain, to a different degree.
00:22:15
Speaker
But it's really the establishment of a new form
00:22:19
Speaker
of monarchy.
00:22:20
Speaker
And that power is established through the image that he projects.
00:22:29
Speaker
Terrific.
00:22:30
Speaker
Thank you.
00:22:30
Speaker
So with that all set out for us now, I think we can finally start to talk about these damn carpets.
00:22:39
Speaker
Damn carpets?
00:22:40
Speaker
What are you saying?
00:22:42
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So I want to know, why did carpets matter?
00:22:45
Speaker
Why did Louis and Colbert want carpets in this gallery?
00:22:49
Speaker
They could have had any sort of flooring that they wanted.
00:22:52
Speaker
Why carpets?
00:22:53
Speaker
That is a very, very good question.
00:22:55
Speaker
Why carpets?
00:22:56
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And I cannot emphasize enough that this is a completely unique chapter in the history of art.
00:23:06
Speaker
So going back, we're thinking about France and Colbert's keen interest in the arts and in luxury goods, and France wanting to be autonomous, i.e.
00:23:19
Speaker
they didn't want to import luxury goods, they wanted to make them themselves.
00:23:25
Speaker
They wanted to have their own architects.
00:23:27
Speaker
They didn't want to import Italian architects to build their palaces.
00:23:30
Speaker
They wanted to train their own architects to build their palaces.
00:23:34
Speaker
They wanted to produce their own tapestries.
00:23:36
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They didn't want to import tapestries from Flanders.
00:23:41
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And carpets were, I mean, the really sort of fine carpets were made in Turkey and in the Middle East, and they were shipped to France at vast expense.
00:23:55
Speaker
And Colbert set out to produce French carpets that were going to be better than Oriental carpets.
00:24:07
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And there was a manufacturing, the Savonry Manufactory, that had been established at the beginning of the 17th century.
00:24:14
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of which the production was small but very fine.
00:24:19
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But Colbert set out to professionalize that manufacturing and produce carpets on a much larger scale and with much more ambitious designs.
00:24:31
Speaker
And so he decided, or we don't know who exactly decided, but
00:24:38
Speaker
In consultation with the monarch and a group of intellectuals who were thinking about how can we project or how can we glorify the image of Ruth XIV, they decided to have a series of carpets made to cover the entire floor of the long gallery of the Louvre.
00:24:57
Speaker
So as I said, this gallery is incredible.
00:25:00
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more than four times the length of the Hall of Mirrors.
00:25:02
Speaker
We're talking about more than 4,000 square feet of surface to be covered with carpets.
00:25:09
Speaker
And so they said, we're going to create what they call the king's carpet, le tapis du roi.
00:25:16
Speaker
And it's always...
00:25:17
Speaker
It's always listed in the inventory as one carpet, at least in the 17th century.
00:25:23
Speaker
But this one carpet was made up of 93 individual carpets.
00:25:29
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And to get a sense of the scale of these carpets, every carpet is about nine meters long, and the width varies between two and a half and four meters, depending on the bay in which they were supposed to be laid out.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:25:45
Speaker
So it's a huge endeavor.
00:25:46
Speaker
It took 20 years to make the carpets between 1668 and 1688, by which time Louis XIV had long lost interest in the Louvre and moved to Versailles.
Technical Challenges in Carpet Making
00:25:59
Speaker
But it is amazing that you have this absolutely extraordinary endeavor that costs an absolute fortune.
00:26:06
Speaker
It's a whole branch of industry that has created, manufactories, to produce these carpets, and then they're never rolled out.
00:26:18
Speaker
And I think one of the reasons is, and we can talk about these carpets and their appearance in a second, is I think that they're so rich visually, they're so colorful, they're so powerful, that...
00:26:33
Speaker
Had Louis XIV, for instance, decided to roll them out, some of them, in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, I think Le Brun would have been rather unhappy with that because they visibly would have competed with the interior that he created in the Hall of Mirrors, particularly the ceiling.
00:26:51
Speaker
And that is why they were so interested in the context of the relationship between what we call fine and what we call decorative arts and the competition between the two of them.
00:27:02
Speaker
Right.
00:27:03
Speaker
So let's take a step back and talk for a moment about this avalry, which you've sort of favorably compared to some of these ideological concepts around the Bauhaus, bringing people together under one roof with different crafts, different techniques, different objectives.
00:27:22
Speaker
Right.
00:27:24
Speaker
But the carpets being made here, as you've said, there's an effort to sort of supersede the preeminence of Oriental carpets.
00:27:36
Speaker
But this is an incredibly difficult task.
00:27:38
Speaker
I mean, this is a very difficult craft to master.
00:27:40
Speaker
It's incredibly time consuming.
00:27:43
Speaker
The materials are expensive.
00:27:45
Speaker
The dyes are expensive.
00:27:47
Speaker
This is not your sort of local crafts person in the town square.
00:27:58
Speaker
What was this manufactory doing?
00:28:01
Speaker
Who were the people who were working there?
00:28:03
Speaker
What kind of scale were they operating on?
00:28:06
Speaker
Give us a sense of just, you know, what was it like to be in the Savonry at the end of the 17th century?
00:28:14
Speaker
Originally, there were two manufacturers, two private manufacturers that were producing the carpets in the Turkish manner.
00:28:27
Speaker
And they had introduced the technique of knotting carpets to France at the beginning of the 17th century.
00:28:35
Speaker
The term savonerie comes from the term savon, soap, because the...
00:28:43
Speaker
the workshop of one of those two manufacturers was in an old soap manufacturing.
00:28:49
Speaker
This is where the term savonerie comes from.
00:28:51
Speaker
And the moment, the beginning of the 1660s, which we mentioned, is such a pivotal moment because suddenly you have the French government, Colbert, throwing money at this endeavor, at the production of carpet.
00:29:08
Speaker
So they're using a manufacturing that already exists,
00:29:12
Speaker
but it's elevated to a royal manufacturing and suddenly their production becomes very, very different.
00:29:19
Speaker
They, for instance, get, there's a bill for huge nine meter long tree trunks that are used to produce the carpets because the wider the loom, if you produce the carpets width wide, you can have more people sitting at the loom to make them.
00:29:41
Speaker
What we have to remember is that since really the beginning of the founding of the Manifactory, many of the carpets were made by orphans.
00:29:51
Speaker
It was seen as an opportunity by the Queen of France to give these children who had no parents a way of making their living.
00:30:04
Speaker
from our point of view, I think that the circumstances under which these carpets were made were not very happy ones.
Innovative Designs and Unmet Grandeur
00:30:14
Speaker
But what is amazing is to think, and we have little documentation, is how very quickly
00:30:20
Speaker
the Savonry reached an incredibly high level of craftsmanship and how that training may have happened.
00:30:28
Speaker
And there we have little documentary evidence, but you can see an extraordinary jump in technique, in the variety of dyes.
00:30:39
Speaker
And this is where it's really important to compare as many carpets with each other.
00:30:45
Speaker
So,
00:30:46
Speaker
And that's the amazing thing about this incredibly ambitious commission of these 93 carpets for the Grande Galerie, because up until, say, 1660, 73 carpets looked quite different.
00:31:00
Speaker
They had...
00:31:02
Speaker
They looked much more like oriental rugs.
00:31:05
Speaker
They were covered in flowers, but didn't have any ambitious iconography.
00:31:12
Speaker
And then as Colbert steps in, he says, okay, well, we need to up the production.
00:31:16
Speaker
We need to up the scale of the carpets, but also their design.
00:31:20
Speaker
And we are going to introduce iconography to these carpets.
00:31:23
Speaker
But of course, they're carpets, they're not tapestries.
00:31:25
Speaker
So you walk onto them.
00:31:26
Speaker
So the design needs to reflect that.
00:31:29
Speaker
It's not like you don't have a sort of narrative sequence.
00:31:32
Speaker
What you create are carpets that are a celebration of the French monarchy through symbolism, but not through narratives.
00:31:41
Speaker
So you have some carpets that are devoted to different Roman deities.
00:31:45
Speaker
There are some carpets that are devoted to the elements.
00:31:49
Speaker
And it's really about...
00:31:52
Speaker
showing France at the center of the universe.
00:31:55
Speaker
But to do that, you need really ambitious designs produced by Charles Lebrun.
00:32:00
Speaker
We can talk about that.
00:32:02
Speaker
But then the ability to translate these designs
00:32:08
Speaker
through extremely good weavers who can translate an ambitious cartoon into a carpet, but also a great broad palette of dyes.
00:32:20
Speaker
And you can see this with the different carpets made in the 1660s that were
00:32:27
Speaker
Clearly, the palette of dyes was broadened for or enlarged for the Grandes Galeries carpets.
00:32:34
Speaker
There was a precursor to the Grandes Galeries carpets, which were a series of 13 carpets made for the Galerie d'Apollon, which is also at the Louvre.
00:32:43
Speaker
And these were on the scale of the Grandes Galeries carpets, but their design wasn't quite as ambitious, pretty ambitious, but not quite as ambitious.
00:32:53
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:32:55
Speaker
Studying them recently in person, we understood that they were not woven width-wise, but length-wise.
00:33:04
Speaker
So the sort of short side of the carpet, which obviously would take longer, can compromise the structure of the carpet and using less dyes.
00:33:15
Speaker
So these carpets were woven between 1664 and 1666, like a sort of trial run.
00:33:22
Speaker
And it seems that between 1666 and 1668, Le Brun and the various people involved in the making of these carpets regrouped, as it were, and tried to see, okay, how can we improve the production and how can we make better carpets and then more ambitious and translate more ambitious designs.
00:33:39
Speaker
So it's an incredible chapter on so many different levels because –
00:33:45
Speaker
because design and technology went hand in hand.
00:33:49
Speaker
And I think, and as I mentioned earlier, many of these carpets were produced by orphans.
00:33:56
Speaker
The working conditions weren't happy ones.
00:34:00
Speaker
So I think it is...
00:34:02
Speaker
It is the kind of object that's sort of akin to the great Gothic cathedrals, the product of a perception of the world pre the Enlightenment when the individual didn't matter, but the sort of cause or the thing that you wanted to do.
Changing Perceptions and Provenance of Carpets
00:34:20
Speaker
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00:34:23
Speaker
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00:34:28
Speaker
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00:34:29
Speaker
At Ross, holiday magic isn't about spending more.
00:34:31
Speaker
It's about giving more for less.
00:34:33
Speaker
Ross, work your magic.
00:34:36
Speaker
So we've been speaking in broad terms about all 93 of these carpets, but of course the designs on each carpet are different.
00:34:45
Speaker
And now three of them are at the Metropolitan Museum.
00:34:49
Speaker
And I wonder if you could tell me a little through the lens of those three, with which of course you're extremely familiar.
00:34:57
Speaker
And what are the design features that they have in common?
00:35:01
Speaker
And then what are some of the different unique features that each carpet has?
00:35:06
Speaker
They all share the same black background that is usually adorned with large cathars scrolls in different colors, blue, yellow, red, etc.
00:35:19
Speaker
It has a fully angular center.
00:35:23
Speaker
with a different colored background, pink, pale blue, yellow, in the center of which is often either a royal cipher or the French royal arms or trophies of arms.
00:35:36
Speaker
And at each end is either a barrel leave with an allegorical figure or a landscape.
00:35:43
Speaker
And the idea is that they were rolled out in alteration accordingly.
00:35:46
Speaker
a landscape carpet and a barrel leaf carpet, the landscape carpet in front of the windows and the barrel leaf carpets in front of the alternating bays.
00:35:57
Speaker
That's sort of the rough scheme.
00:35:58
Speaker
There are some exceptions.
00:36:03
Speaker
So they follow the same pattern.
00:36:05
Speaker
And this is where the sort of genius of Le Brun comes in because there's no visual precedent for that kind of carpet.
00:36:13
Speaker
They don't look at all like carpets from the Middle East anymore.
00:36:18
Speaker
Whereas the earlier production of the Savonry, which were really just arrangements of flowers, you could absolutely tell that they were looking at non-Western tradition.
00:36:28
Speaker
These are carpets for which he developed...
00:36:30
Speaker
a completely new visual language.
00:36:33
Speaker
And it's such a stroke of genius to create this overall similar pattern, but to actually have a carpet that's always different.
00:36:41
Speaker
And this is really the sort of rhetoric tool of the Baroque, of the varietas, so, you know, variety.
00:36:48
Speaker
Every single carpet is different.
00:36:50
Speaker
You know, it's like thinking about Baroque music, is that, you know, you want to have a certain structure, but avoid repetitions and always bring in something new.
00:37:00
Speaker
I wanted to pick up on this thread that you've mentioned a couple of times now, this notion that the carpets were never used, they were never put to their original purpose, which seems really quite extraordinary given the scale of the project and the just unimaginable resources that the Crown was investing into it.
00:37:26
Speaker
I mean, it's like building a new wing on your house and then deciding you're never going to set foot in it.
00:37:35
Speaker
Yes.
00:37:37
Speaker
Why?
00:37:38
Speaker
What went wrong there?
00:37:40
Speaker
Well, the short answer is we don't know.
00:37:43
Speaker
There are few records relating to these carpets in the 17th century.
00:37:49
Speaker
They were...
00:37:53
Speaker
Colbert was clearly proud of the establishment of the manufactory as a royal manufactory and the fact that they produced these carpets and they gave them away as diplomatic gifts as early as 1669.
00:38:08
Speaker
I think that's when the first carpet was given away to the Grand Duke of Tuscany.
00:38:12
Speaker
who incidentally never used it.
00:38:15
Speaker
And the carpet that he was given, or the two carpets he was given, were rediscovered in the attics of the Pity Palace in 1982 in absolutely mint conditions.
00:38:27
Speaker
So that's rather wonderful.
00:38:29
Speaker
And this is the sort of wonderful story of the afterlife of these carpets, which we can talk about in a minute.
00:38:37
Speaker
In the 17th century, there are little records of their usage and or no records of their usage and therefore little records of people's appreciation or reaction to them.
00:38:48
Speaker
So we have one of the few instances where they're mentioned.
00:38:52
Speaker
It's the I think it's the visit of.
00:38:56
Speaker
either the ambassadors of Siam or the ambassadors of Persia, I would have to look it up again.
00:39:00
Speaker
And they are, they are, they are, they're shown the, the storage of the, of the French Royal Furniture Collection, where also the 5,000 or so tapestries that Louis XIV had were kept.
00:39:15
Speaker
And they're shown the carpet of the King.
00:39:18
Speaker
And so very impressive.
00:39:20
Speaker
And, and they are then also given to, to take home with, um,
00:39:24
Speaker
But there's no record of them ever being rolled out.
00:39:28
Speaker
And I think, as I mentioned earlier on, I think it's not only because the king lost interest in the Louvre and the gallery was never finished.
00:39:38
Speaker
The decoration of the gallery was never finished.
00:39:40
Speaker
But also that...
00:39:43
Speaker
using them at Versailles in the Hall of Mirrors would have led to competition between Le Brun's ceiling, which was his masterpiece, and the carpets that he had woven.
00:39:55
Speaker
They would have been a real distraction because they are so bright, so colorful.
00:39:59
Speaker
And, you know, it may also be a change of taste.
00:40:03
Speaker
I think it's very difficult to talk about taste and the development of taste.
00:40:08
Speaker
But, you know, these are things that were designed...
00:40:11
Speaker
They would have been at the height of fashion when they were designed in the 1660s, but 20 years later, design developed and taste developed, and it may just be that they fell out of favor in those terms, too.
00:40:24
Speaker
They were then used on occasions in the 18th century.
00:40:29
Speaker
Both Louis XV and Louis XVI used these carpets.
00:40:33
Speaker
as individual pieces in drawing rooms, just one carpet at a time, or for ambassadorial visits.
00:40:41
Speaker
They were rolled out in the Hall of Mirrors.
00:40:43
Speaker
And there's a wonderful photograph of the carpets, I think 20 or so, being rolled out.
00:40:50
Speaker
And this is the last time that...
00:40:53
Speaker
such last group was rolled out in 1919 for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles.
00:40:58
Speaker
And there's this great photograph of three women working for the Mubile Nationale, sewing the carpets together so that the delegates of the assembly for the Treaty of Versailles didn't trip over the carpets.
00:41:16
Speaker
It's an unbelievably evocative photograph.
00:41:21
Speaker
And then, so in the 18th century, yeah, Louis XIV and Louis XVI use them.
00:41:26
Speaker
And then they start, because they have so many of them, they start to use them.
00:41:32
Speaker
They start to be happy to cut them.
00:41:36
Speaker
So for instance, there's one very important carpet, the first carpet of the series, which Louis XVI used in his dining room at Fontainebleau.
00:41:45
Speaker
But they had to cut out a bit for the fireplace.
00:41:49
Speaker
And that bit was then replaced with a fragment from another sauvonry carpet when the carpet was sent to Italy for Napoleon's use in Rome.
00:42:00
Speaker
And this is where the jigsaw puzzle starts and the sort of afterlife of these carpets, which also is quite an obsession of mine.
00:42:09
Speaker
Indeed.
00:42:09
Speaker
Well, so I want to get into that and how these carpets sort of passed through time and space.
00:42:16
Speaker
And in particular, the three that are now at the Metropolitan Museum, how did those arrive there?
00:42:23
Speaker
So all three carpets have their own interesting story, and I'm in the process of trying to retrace the provenance even further than what
Appreciating Craftsmanship and Final Reflections
00:42:34
Speaker
we know.
00:42:34
Speaker
As you know, museums these days are more and more encouraged to
00:42:40
Speaker
really produce a complete provenance for all the works in their collection, not only for the problematic period between 33 and 45, but really for the whole life, as it were, of the object.
00:42:57
Speaker
So all three carpets, so we've got two carpets that were acquired by the museum in the 1950s,
00:43:03
Speaker
And the third carpet that was presented to the museum by Mrs. Reitzman in 1976.
00:43:10
Speaker
And I think she gave the museum all in all four savernier carpets, one from the Long Gallery and then three Louis Trez carpets.
00:43:20
Speaker
So one of the carpets that the Met has is a carpet of which three versions were woven because the first version, Louis XIV, gave away to the ambassadors of Siam.
00:43:35
Speaker
And I'm still trying to figure out whether it's still in the Thai Royal Collection.
00:43:41
Speaker
We know that it was in the Thai Royal Collection in 1910 because back then the administrators of the Thai Royal Collection got in touch with the movie National in Paris asking if they could repair it.
00:43:50
Speaker
But since then, the trace is somewhat lost.
00:43:54
Speaker
And then two more weavings were made because the same carpet was then given to the ambassadors of Persia.
00:44:01
Speaker
We know that one carpet ended up in Thailand, what is now Thailand.
00:44:06
Speaker
And the other two carpets, one is at the Met and the other one is at the Huntington Museum in Pasadena.
00:44:11
Speaker
So one of those two must have been the...
00:44:16
Speaker
the one given to the ambassadors of Persia.
00:44:18
Speaker
But to retrace that story is slightly complicated because both end up in Europe.
00:44:24
Speaker
And whether they were given to the ambassadors of Persia and then never ended up in Persia or then somehow found their way back to Europe is a difficult one to retrace.
00:44:38
Speaker
What is interesting is
00:44:40
Speaker
So we have 103 carpets made for the Grand Galerie, so including reweaves, 13 carpets for the Apollo Gallery.
00:44:48
Speaker
That adds up to 116 carpets, each of which has its own story.
00:44:54
Speaker
40 are with the Mobile National, some of which...
00:44:57
Speaker
had been sold after the revolution were reacquired.
00:45:02
Speaker
About 20 or so are in museums and private collections.
00:45:05
Speaker
Then there are fragments of these carpets that come up for sale relatively regularly.
00:45:11
Speaker
And I make it my business to try and identify whether that fragment
00:45:16
Speaker
is from a particular carpet.
00:45:18
Speaker
And there are about 18 or so carpets that are completely unaccounted for where we have no trace.
00:45:24
Speaker
We don't know what happened to them.
00:45:26
Speaker
The tricky bit is that the carpets with the landscapes are always the difficult ones because they usually have...
00:45:34
Speaker
don't have as specific an iconography as the one with barry leaves.
00:45:38
Speaker
And so it's extremely difficult to then identify.
00:45:40
Speaker
I mean, there are some fragments with landscape, but it's quasi impossible to say, okay, that must be from that carpet.
00:45:47
Speaker
You know, whenever I look through a book that has photographs of historic interiors, the first thing I do is look at the floor and I've come across so many sauvonry carpets where suddenly I said, oh, this is this carpet.
00:45:59
Speaker
Oh, clearly then it must have been in that collection in the 1950s or in 1910 or
00:46:04
Speaker
So listeners, take note, there are more out there to be discovered.
00:46:07
Speaker
And should you keep your eyes open and come across one, well, you know who to talk to.
00:46:13
Speaker
Indeed, please let me know.
00:46:16
Speaker
So you've mentioned that some 20 or so are in museum collections.
00:46:20
Speaker
Of course, you mentioned the two that are in the Reitzman galleries.
00:46:25
Speaker
Where else around the world can listeners go to see these?
00:46:28
Speaker
So predominantly Britain and America, and that is part of the 19th century or late 19th century story of those carpets is the taste particularly of the Rothschilds and the Afrusis for these carpets and for anything that had to do with the Ancien Régime and furniture of Louis XIV, XV, and XVI.
00:46:50
Speaker
So there was a real taste for it in Britain and America for these carpets.
00:46:55
Speaker
So there are...
00:46:57
Speaker
several carpets at Waddenstown Manor in Berkshire, the great Rothschild house.
00:47:04
Speaker
There are some more in private collections in England, but that are open to the public.
00:47:11
Speaker
And then there are three at the Metropolitan Museum, one in Philadelphia, two at the Huntington,
00:47:19
Speaker
and uh and then also in some some uh uh private american collections the getty had um the getty when they built the new getty center had acquired one and then it didn't fit the galleries it was too big because the design of the galleries changed and so they deaccessioned it again because they knew they couldn't put it on display right um but it found a happy home that's respectable but it's it's um uh and and you know and and sometimes i mean for instance
00:47:48
Speaker
What is amazing to me is, yes, you do occasionally, very rarely, occasionally come to
00:47:53
Speaker
come across a carpet that you didn't know of.
00:47:55
Speaker
Usually it's fragments, but I have once or twice come across a carpet I didn't know of.
00:47:59
Speaker
And one, for instance, there's one at Floor's Castle in Scotland.
00:48:04
Speaker
And there is an American connection there because the Duchess of Brogsborough, who acquired the carpet, was a galette from Newport.
00:48:13
Speaker
And so there's a Newport connection there in the same way that
00:48:19
Speaker
One of the carpets that is here at the Met, what belonged to the Duchess of Marlborough, whose mother was a Vanderbilt, also living at Newport.
00:48:27
Speaker
So there is this sort of interesting sort of three-way connection between France, Britain, and America and the taste for these objects of the Ancien Régime.
00:48:38
Speaker
You won't find many seven recarpets outside these three countries.
00:48:42
Speaker
There are, as I mentioned, there are some in Italy and Florence and Naples.
00:48:45
Speaker
There are none in Germany.
00:48:49
Speaker
I don't think there are any in Spain, but there may be still some in Spanish private collections because, as I said, the ambassador of France to Spain.
00:48:57
Speaker
had several savernry carpets.
00:49:00
Speaker
One ended up at the Met via, apparently, Santiago de Compostela.
00:49:06
Speaker
Apparently, it was in the convent there.
00:49:08
Speaker
And another carpet was the Getty carpet.
00:49:11
Speaker
That, too, came through Spain.
00:49:13
Speaker
So there may be some more in Spanish private collections.
00:49:18
Speaker
Last question for those of us who seek out these carpets and perhaps come across them in a museum collection or elsewhere.
00:49:28
Speaker
What would you recommend that we pay attention to when we're looking at them?
00:49:35
Speaker
Well, I think what is what is helpful is when you look at one of those carpets is to.
00:49:43
Speaker
to be aware of the fact that they come in very different states of preservation.
00:49:48
Speaker
So there are some in public collections that really led a very rich life, and you can see that.
00:49:56
Speaker
So it's helpful to, I think, afterwards go online and look at pictures of those that are better preserved.
00:50:04
Speaker
The Mobili Nacional, as I said,
00:50:05
Speaker
They have all their carpets on their website, and some of them are really beautifully preserved and really get a much stronger sense of the very rich color scheme.
00:50:15
Speaker
Earlier we talked about how they were so different from oriental rugs.
00:50:22
Speaker
One, I think, key source of inspiration on the design of these carpets were marble floors, which Le Brun would have seen in Rome, and Pietradura tables and plaques that used these very, very colorful and bright stones and often had a black background, rather like the carpets have a black background, in front of which...
00:50:43
Speaker
all those colors, yellow, red, blue, can really pop.
00:50:48
Speaker
So I think it's important to bear in mind that often the carpets that we do see in public collections are the ones that led a rich life and therefore of which the colors might be a little subdued.
00:51:00
Speaker
I think another element to look out for is how the artists, the weavers, managed to translate the cartoon into the image that is quite three-dimensional.
00:51:13
Speaker
I mean, what's amazing about them is that...
00:51:16
Speaker
That the rendition of the acanthus leaves, the acanthus scrolls, of the animal masks, of the suns, of all the royal symbols is extremely three-dimensional.
00:51:27
Speaker
And to really appreciate the craftsmanship in translating these ambitious cartoons into carpets.
00:51:33
Speaker
And then the...
00:51:35
Speaker
The third thing is looking at the black background because the black background is so interesting in terms of the history of the dyes that they used.
00:51:44
Speaker
And we have to remember, you know, the dyes didn't come out of a bottle.
00:51:48
Speaker
These are all natural dyes that were created.
00:51:54
Speaker
in a scientific manner that they could do at the time, but the end product could vary.
00:52:00
Speaker
And the black dye clearly was a really difficult color to achieve because you can see that there's a huge variation, often within one carpet, between the black dye.
00:52:12
Speaker
So you can see streaks of either brown or dark blue where the color has changed.
00:52:21
Speaker
And sometimes...
00:52:24
Speaker
The mortar in the dye, actually, there was too much of it in the dye, and that actually eats up the thread.
00:52:29
Speaker
So sometimes the background has vanished, or you can see that around the black area, some of the thread is eaten up.
00:52:36
Speaker
That's because that batch of dye...
00:52:40
Speaker
had too much mortar in it and gradually ate up the thread.
00:52:43
Speaker
And that's true of black and some greys.
00:52:46
Speaker
So you will see that in these carpets, sometimes there's a variation in the thickness of the pile.
00:52:51
Speaker
And this is something that you can really see with the naked eye without getting too close.
00:52:56
Speaker
And that is significant to the dyes that were employed in the making of these carpets.
00:53:03
Speaker
Again, a much longer answer than what you were probably hoping for.
00:53:08
Speaker
Not at all.
00:53:10
Speaker
The more detailed, the better.
00:53:11
Speaker
And I just love to have a few touchstones for my own personal observations of these things.
00:53:17
Speaker
And that goes for people who have the chance to see these objects in their local museums or on their trips.
00:53:25
Speaker
But also some of this is, of course, going to be visible in the images that we'll provide or that you can
00:53:32
Speaker
find elsewhere on the internet.
00:53:34
Speaker
Wolf, thank you so much.
00:53:35
Speaker
This has been a great pleasure and I really appreciate your time, your insight and your expertise.
00:53:41
Speaker
My pleasure.
00:53:41
Speaker
This was great fun and thank you for indulging me and letting me babble about these carpets that I'm so very fond of.
00:53:51
Speaker
I don't think anyone is going to begrudge you that indulgence.
00:53:56
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati with social media and web support from Sarah Bellotta.
00:54:01
Speaker
Sierra Holt is our digital media and editorial associate.
00:54:04
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit and I'm Ben Miller.
00:54:29
Speaker
Think Verizon, the best 5G network, is expensive?
00:54:31
Speaker
Think again.
00:54:32
Speaker
Bring in your AT&T or T-Mobile bill to a Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.
00:54:36
Speaker
Now, what to do with your unwanted bills?
00:54:38
Speaker
Ever seen an origami version of the bean?
00:54:41
Speaker
Jokes aside, Verizon has the most ways to save on phones and plans where everyone in the family can choose their own plan and save.
00:54:46
Speaker
So bring in your bill to your local Chicago Verizon store today and we'll give you a better deal.
00:54:50
Speaker
Rankings based on RootMetric TrueSquare report dated 1H 2025.
00:54:53
Speaker
Your results may vary.
00:54:54
Speaker
Must provide a postpaid consumer mobile bill dated within the past 45 days.
00:54:56
Speaker
Bill must be in the same name as the person who made the deal.