Apollo Gallery carpet no. 2 or 3

Prior to weaving the Louvre’s Grande Galerie series, the Savonnerie produced thirteen carpets for the adjacent Apollo Gallery. The stylistic novelty and ambition of the Apollo carpets’ design marked a major turning point in French carpet weaving and served as a trial run for the Grande Galerie project. This particular example was used by Queen Marie Antoinette in 1785 for the temporary game rooms she had built for Carnival. It later came into the possession of the Rothschild family, who were the driving force behind establishing the fashion for Savonnerie carpets in interior decoration around 1900. It subsequently belonged to the Johnson & Johnson heiress Barbara Johnson, who used it at her house, Jasna Polana, outside Princeton, New Jersey. The face inside the sun burst is a modern replacement.