American Friends of Attingham Albainy Memorial Lecture

Please join AFA as we welcome Dr. Wolf Burchard, Curator of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, as the esteemed speaker for the Tracey L. Albainy Memorial Lecture, co-hosted by the American Friends of Attingham and The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts. The American Friends of Attingham is delighted to welcome the public to this complimentary program, held in the Bonnie J. Sacerdote Lecture Hall at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

“The King’s Carpet,” or le tapis du roi, was an enormous rug made up of 92 individual pieces that were intended to cover the entire span of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre, six times the length of the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Despite the monumental expense and energy lavished on this spectacular royal commission, Louis XIV appears never to have used the carpets.

With time, the notion of “one” carpet was forgotten and individual pieces were given away, some finding their way into the homes of English and American collectors, most notably the Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, and Wrightsmans. The altered and dispersed carpets thus became an enormous jigsaw puzzle, which Emmanuelle Federspiel and Antonin Macé de Lepinay of the Mobilier national in Paris, and Wolf Burchard of The Met in New York, are reconstructing, carpet by carpet, fragment by fragment.

IMAGES: (Banner) Art historians including Wolf Burchard, Antonin Macé de Lepinay, and Elizabeth Cleland, examine the tapis de la Grande Galerie du Louvre, preserved by the Mobilier national in Paris, in 2023. (Above) Experts unroll the Tapis Grande Galerie du Louvre at the Mobilier national in Paris. Photos © Justine Rossignol.

Info: Dr. Burchard is Curator at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and was recently appointed a Trustee of the Attingham Trust. He earned his MA and PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art and is the author of The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (2016) and curated Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts (2021) shown at The Met, the Wallace Collection and the Huntington.

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