Panel with trophy representing Africa

The panels are each carved with a trophy comprising arms and armor suspended from a tasseled ribbon: in antiquity, military victories were commemorated with a display of arms captured from enemy troops and hung on a tree or temple. Oak branches are added to the martial symbols on 07.225.100a. Laurel branches, a laurel wreath and a standard with SPQR (short for Senatus Populusque Romanus or the Senate and the Roman People) above a portrait of a Roman emperor or general are added to the arms and armor on 07.225.100b. The shield with the horse on this panel and the one with a lion on the other, symbolize Europe and Africa respectively, and suggest an originally larger ensemble of woodwork with references to the four continents, a popular decorating theme during the eighteenth-century. Stripped of their original paint layer, these carvings may have served as door or shutter panels.

This pair of panels was once part of the model collection of woodwork, paneling, and seat furniture of Maison Leys, a successful decorating business, located at the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Since 1885 the business was directed by Georges Hoentschel who installed the collection in 1903 in a museum-like display at Boulevard Flandrin, Paris. Three years later, Hoentschel sold the collection to J. Pierpont Morgan who gave the panels with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.