Armchair (fauteuil)
Louis Delanois
An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art
This type of armchair is known in French as a "fauteuil à la reine" because of its straight back and "à chassis" because the seat, back, and armpads can easily be removed to change the upholstery. Stamped by Louis Delanois (1731–1792), a Parisian menuisier who specialized in seat furniture in the late Rococo and neoclassical taste, this chair is in a transitional style and reflects the transition between the Louis XV and Louis XVI styles. The cabriole legs and curving arm supports, which are not yet placed directly above the legs but are set back, are still expressions of the Rococo. The laurel garlands and husk motifs on the seat rail, at the knees, and on the back rail show influence of neoclassicism. At least one other chair of this model is known which may have been part of the same set of seat furniture. This armchair was part of the model collection of woodwork, paneling and seat furniture of Maison Leys, a successful decorating business, located at the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Since 1885 the business was directed by Georges Hoentschel who installed the collection in 1903 in a museum-like display at Boulevard Flandrin, Paris. Three years later, Hoentschel sold the collection to J. Pierpont Morgan who gave the panels with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.
European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art
The fifty thousand objects in the Museum's comprehensive and historically important collection of European sculpture and decorative arts reflect the development of a number of art forms in Western European countries from the early fifteenth through the early twentieth century. The holdings include sculpture in many sizes and media, woodwork and furniture, ceramics and glass, metalwork and jewelry, horological and mathematical instruments, and tapestries and textiles. Ceramics made in Asia for export to European markets and sculpture and decorative arts produced in Latin America during this period are also included among these works.