Cupid Seated on a Garland

This overdoor painting of a cupid with quiver, floral wreath, and torch, seated on a garland of flowers suspended from two blue ribbons, was part of the model collection of woodwork, paneling, and seat furniture of Maison Leys. Maison Leys was 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 this overdoor with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907. Still retaining a Maison Leys inventory label on its reverse, the painting has in the past been attributed to Le Riche, a painter who worked for Marie Antoinette at Versailles.