Side table

Charles Lebrun

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

Best known as Louis XlV’s court painter, Charles Le Brun was also a gifted designer of decorative arts. Between 1683 and 1687, a number of Le Brun’s sketches for items of furniture were executed in solid silver and supplied to the Galerie des Glaces (Hall of Mirrors) at the Palace of Versailles. In 1689, needing funds to pay his troops, Louis had these marvels of craftsmanship melted down; they yielded about 20,000 tons of silver bullion attesting to the immense quantity of these extraordinary items. Before they were destroyed however, elements of their shapes and decoration were adapted to less valuable materials such as gilt-bronze and wood. With its winged caryatid figures, this gilded oak table which dates to ca. 1690, resembles one shown in an etching of the Galerie des Glaces, and it is likely a later and humbler version of a piece originally made of solid silver.

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