Panel formed of three smaller panels, interior decoration of the apartment of the comtesse d‘Artois at Versailles

Carved with the lyre of Apollo and ivy branches, a trophy of gardening tools, as well as a foliated wreath intertwined with flaming torches, this panel, composed of three parts, was part of the interior decoration of the apartment of the comtesse d‘Artois at Versailles. In 1773 Marie-Thérèse of Savoy married the grandson of Louis XV (and younger brother of the future Louis XVI) the comte d’Artois. The following year her first floor (American second floor) apartment in the Midi Wing of the palace was renovated to include a small library on the mezzanine level. Jules Hugues Rousseau and his younger sibling Jean-Siméon, who were decorative painters as well as carvers, were responsible for the delicate carving of the paneling in this room.

The woodwork was later dismantled and sold and this panel became 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.