Cupid Seated on a Garland

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This overdoor painting of a cupid with quiver, floral wreath, and torch, seated on a garland of flowers suspended from two blue ribbons, was part of the model collection of woodwork, paneling, and seat furniture of Maison Leys. Maison Leys was 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 this overdoor with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907. Still retaining a Maison Leys inventory label on its reverse, the painting has in the past been attributed to Le Riche, a painter who worked for Marie Antoinette at Versailles.

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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art