Louis XIV’s Savonnerie Carpets: “Stages of Power” Revisited

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Louis XIV’s Savonnerie Carpets: “Stages of Power” RevisitedA Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century French Decorative Arts and Culture by Wolf Burchard (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)Wednesday, October 7, 202638 West 86th Street, Lecture [email protected]$15 General | $12 Seniors | Free for people associated with a college or university, people with museum ID, people with disabilities and caregivers, and BGC membersNo late seating; admittance is not guaranteed after 6 pm.In February 2018 Wolf Burchard delivered a Françoise and Georges Selz Lecture entitled “Stages of Power,” which explored the history of the Savonnerie carpet manufactory. This fall he will return to BGC for an update on his ongoing research on the subject. In 2023 Burchard joined forces with Emmanuelle Federspiel and Antonin Macé de Lepinay of the Mobilier national in Paris. Together, they curated Le Trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil (Grand Palais, Paris, 2026), an exhibition that showcased thirty-two of the ninety-two Savonnerie carpets made in the late seventeenth century to cover the full span of the Grande Galerie of the Palais du Louvre. The three curators are now in the throes of writing a comprehensive catalogue of all 115 Savonnerie carpets woven for the Grande Galerie and Galerie d’Apollon. Together with Met curator Elizabeth Cleland, Burchard also curated A King’s Carpet: Louis XIV and the Savonnerie (Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2028), the first exhibition devoted to the French royal carpet manufacturer in the United States. Building on his last lecture on the Savonnerie at BGC, Burchard will return to notions of royal carpets as stages of power, their use during the Ancien régime and the French Revolution, as well as the heydays of the Rothschilds and America’s Gilded Age robber barons.Wolf Burchard is curator in the Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before joining the Met in 2019, he served as furniture research curator at the National Trust and curatorial assistant at the Royal Collection. He earned his MA and PhD in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. He is the author of The Sovereign Artist: Charles Le Brun and the Image of Louis XIV (2016) and Picture Democracy (2026), and curated Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts (2021), which was exhibited at the Met, the Wallace Collection, and the Huntington. He is currently coauthoring a new monograph on Louis XIV’s Savonnerie carpets for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre.Bard Graduate Center is grateful for the generous support of the Selz Foundation.Image: Le Trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil, Grand Palais, Paris, February 1–8, 2026.Object LabsAt Bard Graduate Center, we use an object-centered approach to advance the study of the decorative arts, design history, and material culture. Join our student educators before select Fall 2026 public events to learn about some of the objects in BGC’s Study Collection. Each week we will showcase three objects carefully selected from the collection, which includes more than five thousand objects in a variety of media. Drop in anytime between 5 and 6 pm; the experience takes roughly ten minutes.October 7, 14, and 21; November 4, 11, and 1838 West 86th Street, New York5–6 pmFounded in 2011, the BGC Study Collection supports student research by providing opportunities for hands-on close examination of objects. Learn more about the BGC Study Collection here.