Amorini at play (one of a pair)

Piat Joseph Sauvage

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This pair of grisaille overdoors are painted in the manner of Piat Joseph Sauvage (1744–1818), a Flemish painter, known for his decorative paintings often using trompe l’oeil effects. It is possible that these two overdoors were part of a series representing the four elements. Water and fire are depicted on 07.225.315a – one putto holds an urn from which water flows, traditionally the depiction of a river god, while another holds a flaming torch. Air and earth are depicted on 07.225.315b – several putti play with bubbles, while another collects fruit and a third is frightened by a snake. These overdoors, painted to simulate plaster reliefs, were 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 overdoors 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.

Metropolitan Museum of Art