Panel (from a sedan chair (?))

This grisaille panel exemplifies the fashion for Chinoiserie, the imitation or evocation of Chinese motifs in Western art.in mid-eighteenth century France. Its size and shape suggest that it came from a sedan chair, probably made in Paris, the center for luxury carriage manufacture. A lavishly decorated sedan chair emphasized the owner’s status. Set in a garden, the scene of the two women and the boy holding a drawing is reminiscent of compositions by François Boucher (1703-1770). Its frame consisting of S and C shaped scrolls, floral garlands and leaf motifs, typical for the Rococo period, suggests a date of ca. 1745.

This painted panel 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.