Vase of Flowers Resting on Foliate Scrolls

This late eighteenth-century painted canvas depicts a floral arrangement resting on foliate scrolls combined with a wreath, garlands, and ribbons above. The delicately rendered flowers, a specialty of the French painters, are comparable in quality and naturalism to carved wooden panels that were also 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 painting with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907.