A ROYAL LOUIS XIV SAVONNERIE FRAGMENTARY CARPET, CIRCA 1668-1688

This carpet appears to have been assembled from fragments of one or more of the carpets supplied by the Savonnerie factory for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, one of the most important and ambitious royal commissions of the reign of Louis XIV. As part of a broader scheme to glorify the French monarchy through the splendour of its official residences and at the same time promote French arts and industry, the young King desired to transform the Louvre into the most magnificent royal palace in Europe.

The most spectacular space of the late 17th-century Louvre was the long gallery linking the old royal apartments of the Cour Carrée with the Pavillon de Flore at the south end of the Tuileries Palace facing the gardens. Constructed during the reign of Henri IV in the first decade of the 17th century, it was referred to as the Galerie du bord de l'eau and extended along the Seine for a length of 442 metres at an internal width of nearly 9 metres. The floors below were intended as accommodation and workshop or studio space for artists and craftsmen who were granted royal warrants, among them the cabinetmaker André-Charles Boulle. The gallery today serves as an exhibition space for the Louvre's important collection of Italian paintings. The ceiling of its 46 bays was originally intended to be painted by Nicolas Poussin in a scheme that had never come to fruition, and the carpets formed part of broader project to complete the gallery's overall decoration.

The broader scheme would have been supervised by the King's First Minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619-1683) in collaboration with the architect Louis Le Vau (d.1670) and the head of the Gobelins Tapestry Factory and premier peintre du roi Charles Le Brun (1619-1690), who is believed to have played a role in providing the designs. The composition was uniform for the entire series, with a large central allegorical section flanked by rich arabesques and rinceaux on a rich fond brun brown-black ground, and cartouches at either end depicting either classical bas-reliefs or more rarely landscapes, all within a classical reeded border and fleur-de-lis in the four corners. The full panoply of classic Louis XIV iconography was already in evidence, with extensive use of suns, crowns, interlaced L's, the arms of France and Navarre, globes, wreaths and trophies and allegorical figures based on Cesare Ripa's Iconologia - all intended as a mirror reflection of the sumptuous painted and stucco decoration on the ceilings above. In total all but one of the 93 projected carpets were woven between 1668 and 1688.

By the 1670s, however, Louis XIV had had abandoned the idea of making the Louvre his principal seat in favour of Versailles, and it seems unlikely the series was ever installed. The carpets remained in the possession of the Royal Garde-Meuble, some occasionally used in various royal residences and others offered as diplomatic gifts. During the torment of the Revolution several were sold or offered as payment in exchange to suppliers of essential goods and foodstuffs. Numerous examples were reduced in size and/or cut down and re-assembled, and many are still unrecorded and presumed lost. The French Mobilier National state collections still retain the largest surviving group of over fifty, and interestingly these were woven together and laid on the floor of the Hall of Mirrors in Versailles during the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919, possibly the only instance of these carpets ever being displayed as they were originally intended. Other surviving carpets or fragments are in the Metropolitan Museum New York, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Huntington Art Museum and Waddesdon Manor.

The Savonnerie factory was founded in 1615 by Pierre DuPont, who had studied the technique of manufacturing knotted-pile carpets in the Ottoman Empire, and in 1627 Louis XIII granted a royal monopoly to Dupont and his former apprentice Simon Lourdet, whose families ran rival workshops divided between the large ateliers on the ground floor of the Grande Galerie and in a former soap factory on the Quai de Chaillot, then on the western edge of Paris, and from which the factory's name derives. Its products were reserved exclusively for the Crown and served in royal interiors and as diplomatic gifts. Prior to Louis XIV's commission the Savonnerie had never previously produced carpets of such a large scale, and special looms of exceptional width had to constructed.