Panel

This panel displays delicate low relief carving of floral garlands, a floral wreath, a trophy of gardening tools and sunhat as well as a small still life below consisting of an overturned ewer, a sun hat, wheat ears, laurel branches and gardening tools. The small scale of this neoclassical panel and the high quality carving suggest it may have been made by a decorative sculptor as a masterpiece for presentation at the Académie royale d’architecture (Royal Academy of Architecture) in order to show his talent and secure future commissions.

This anonymous low relief was 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 panel with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.