Enfilade

This AFA lecture is free and open to the public:

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

American Friends of Attingham Albainy Memorial Lecture

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 May 2025, 6pm

Wolf Burchard, Antonin Macé de Lepinay, and Elizabeth Cleland examine the Tapis Grande Galerie du Louvre, preserved by the Mobilier national in Paris, in 2023 (Photo by Justine Rossignol).

‘The King’s Carpet’, or 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 were given away, some finding their way into the 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.

Please join AFA as we welcome Dr. Wolf Burchard as the esteemed speaker for this Tracey L. Albainy Memorial Lecture, co-hosted by the American Friends of Attingham and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. The AFA is delighted to welcome the public to this complimentary program, held in the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall at The Met. Registration is available here.

Tracey L. Albainy (1962–2007) served as Senior Curator of Decorative Arts and Sculpture, Art of Europe at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was a devoted Attingham supporter, completing multiple courses.

Wolf Burchard is Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was recently appointed a Trustee of the Attingham Trust. He earned his MA and PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and is the author of The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (2016). He curated the exhibition Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts (2021) shown at The Met, The Wallace Collection, and The Huntington.