French royal furniture in the Metropolitan Museum

"The Metropolitan Museum's holdings of French royal furniture bears witness to an important chapter in the history of decorative arts. The Museum acquired the first of these pieces in 1906, as gifts of the American financier J. Pierpont Morgan (18371913), its president at the time. Since then, many more impressive pieces of French furniture and furnishings have been added to the Museum's collection. Some of these objects were bequests or purchases, but mostly they were gifts of well-known American collectors and patrons. This catalogue is the first publication to bring together and discuss all twenty-nine masterpieces of French royal furniture in the Museum's collection. From the reign of Louis XIV through the time of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the French crown demanded and obtained the best possible results from supremely gifted and specialized furniture makers. Encased in rare woods with golden webs of bronze, the glamour of these works is finely compounded with utilitarian purpose. The furniture pieces reflect attitudes and events from Louis XIV's propagandistic invocations of the sun god Apollo to later fascinations with the Orient, ancient Egypt, and even the hot air balloon, a specifically French achievement."--The Metropolitan Museum of Art web site.