Amorini at play (one of a pair)

This pair of grisaille overdoors are painted in the manner of Piat Joseph Sauvage (1744–1818), a Flemish painter, known for his decorative paintings often using trompe l’oeil effects. It is possible that these two overdoors were part of a series representing the four elements. Water and fire are depicted on 07.225.315a – one putto holds an urn from which water flows, traditionally the depiction of a river god, while another holds a flaming torch. Air and earth are suggested on 07.225.315b – several putti play with bubbles, while another collects fruit and a third is frightened by a snake.



These overdoors, painted to simulate plaster reliefs, were 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 overdoors with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.