Fire screen (écran)

Georges Jacob

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Georges Jacob supplied a set of seat furniture and a fire screen that were clearly designed to harmonize with the rest of the gold and silver décor. The gilt frame of the screen, which is now in the Museum's collection, incorporates silvered highlights such as the pearls and wisps of ivy strung around the two uprights shaped like burning torches, though they are now much worn. The string of pearls pulled through an openwork spiraling ribbon carved on the screen's top and lower rails also decorates the moldings of the paneling in the boudoir, and the same motif recurs in gilt bronze on the rolltop desk and the worktable. The original upholstery on the screen, a white gros de Tour, or ribbed silk, embroidered with colorful flowers, has been replaced with an eighteenth-century silk brocaded panel with a medallion enclosing a pastoral trophy in the style of the Lyon silk designer and manufacturer Philippe de Lasalle (1723–1805). During the Directoire period, in the late 1790s, the screen and the seat furniture from Marie Antoinette's boudoir at Fontainebleau were used at the Château de Saint Cloud (whose name is stamped several times on the screen's frame).

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