Louis XIV’s Savonnerie Carpets:
The World’s Largest Jigsaw Puzzle
Thursday, May 22, 2025
6:00 p.m. ET
At The Metropolitan Museum of Art
1000 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10028
Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall
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. The American Friends of Attingham is delighted to welcome the public to this complimentary program.
* * * * *
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.
RESERVE TICKETS
Tickets & Arrival
Tickets should be reserved in advance via Eventbrite using the button below. A limited number of tickets will be available at the door on May 22. Please enter the museum at 81st Street and Fifth Avenue and proceed to check-in inside The Ruth and Harold D. Uris Center for Education.
About Wolf Burchard
Dr. Burchard is Curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was recently appointed a Trustee of the Attingham Trust. Prior to joining The Met in 2019, he was Furniture Research Curator at the National Trust and Curatorial Assistant at the Royal Collection. He earned his MA and PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is the author of The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (2016) and curated Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts (2021) shown at The Met, the Wallace Collection and the Huntington.
About Tracey L. Albainy
Tracey L. Albainy (1962-2007) was the Russell B. and Andrée Beauchamp Stearns Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of Europe, MFA Boston, and an enthusiastic support of Attingham. She attended the Summer School in 1990, the Study Programme in 2000, and Royal Collections Studies in August 2007, months before her untimely death that December. A native of Cleveland, Ohio, Albainy graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Smith College, and received her master of arts in art history from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and another master of arts degree from Parsons School of Design/Cooper-Hewitt Museum Graduate Program in the History of European Decorative Arts. From 1993 to 2000, she held curatorial positions in the European Sculpture and Decorative Arts department at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Prior to that, she served as Associate Curator of European Decorative Arts at the Birmingham Museum of Art. She joined the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 2000.
About the Tracey L. Albainy Memorial Lecture
Attingham alumna Brigette Fletcher ’02, RCS ’03 of Boston, MA, spearheaded the development of the Memorial Lecture, following a resolution from the American Friends of Attingham Board of Directors in 2008 in recognition of her contributions to the field of decorative arts. In 2007, Tracey hired a future Attingham alumna, Rebecca Tilles ’09, LHC ’10, SP ’16, RCS ’22, to join her department at the MFA, Boston. The American Friends of Attingham is grateful to Brigette and Rebecca for their endeavors to organize and fundraise for our past lecturers listed below, and Rebecca for reviving the series this year.
- 2011, “A Napoleonic Achievement: The Restoration of the Hôtel Beauharnais” by Visiting Assistant Professor Ulrich Leban of the Bard Graduate Center, co-sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
- 2012, “‘Of Cauliflower and Crayfish’: The High Art of Dining in 18th-Century France” by Charissa Bremer-David, Curator of Sculpture and Decorative Arts for The Getty Center.
- 2016, “Della Robbia Sculpture: Renaissance Invention and Modern Rediscovery” by Marietta Cambareri, Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture and the Jetskalina H. Phillips Curator of Judaica, Art of Europe, for the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
With much gratitude to our host
The Metropolitan Museum of Art
Art historians including Wolf Burchard, Antonin Macé de Lepinay, and Elizabeth Cleland pictured above, examine the Tapis Grande Galerie du Louvre, preserved by the Mobilier national in Paris, in 2023. Photo © Justine Rossignol.