A King's Carpet: Louis XIV and the Savonnerie" at The Met

In 1668, Louis XIV commissioned the Parisian manufactory Savonnerie to create the largest carpet ever woven: composed of 92 individual pieces, the ensemble was designed to cover the entire length of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, 440 meters—six times the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. The first exhibition dedicated to Savonnerie in the United States, "A King's Carpet" sheds light on the Met's three carpets that were part of this ambitious project, brought together in the iconic Wrightsman Galleries to tell their turbulent story—from conception and harsh production conditions to their dispersal after the French Revolution. Woven over 20 years by a disposable workforce of orphans and teenagers with sharp eyesight and agile fingers, the 92 carpets were never laid out in the space for which they were made, as Louis XIV turned his attention from the Louvre to Versailles. During the Revolution, many lost their royal emblems or were sold, some finding new homes in prominent American collections, such as those of J. P. Morgan and Alva Vanderbilt. The exhibition brings together four complete carpets and a selection of fragments that bear witness to this fragmentation and dispersal, as well as a temporary conservation studio installed in the gallery itself, where the public can observe textile conservators restoring one of these monumental carpets.