Panel

This panel, carved with a stag head, a horn, hunting rifle and sword, as well as other references to the hunt, an autumn pastime, may have been part of a decorative scheme symbolizing the four seasons. The vine-leaves and grapes, allude to fall as well, and together with the thyrsus (staff with pine cone on top), are associated with Dionysus or Bacchus, the god of wine.

This panel 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.