Frame for a daybed (Lit de repos)

This elaborately carved three-part frame was originally part of a daybed or a sofa. Although not signed, the curving outline of the frame is enriched with heart-shaped cartouches, rocaille motifs and floral ornament that bear resemblance to the work of the menuisiers or joiners Jean-Baptiste Tilliard and Nicolas-Quinibert Foliot. Normally invisible, the rectangular blocks underneath the frame are the tenons which would have fitted in similar size openings, the mortises, to join the frame to the lower part of the bed or sofa.


Although incomplete, this frame 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 frame with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.