# Armchair (fauteuil) from Louis XVI's Salon des Jeux at Saint Cloud > Georges Jacob - 1788 > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/georges-jacob/louis-xvi-armchair-saint-cloud-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-03 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Georges Jacob - **Date:** 1788 - **Medium:** Carved and gilded walnut; modern gold brocaded silk upholstery, not original - **Dimensions:** 100 x 74.9 x 65.1 cm (39 3/8 x 29 1/2 x 25 5/8 in.) - **Object type:** Furniture - **Period:** French, Louis XVI, 18th century - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gallery 527 - **Attribution:** accepted ## Summary A gilded walnut armchair made in 1788 for the King's gaming room at the chateau de Saint-Cloud, one of sixteen identical chairs Georges Jacob supplied to the royal Garde-Meuble under a Louis XVI commission that survives in the Metropolitan Museum's own accounts down to the livre: 24 for Jacob's joinery, 180 for the unnamed carver, 240 for Louis-Francois Chatard's gilding. The chateau it was made for no longer exists; it burned in 1870 and was demolished, so this chair and its siblings are now among the more informative physical witnesses to a vanished royal interior.Seized as crown property in the Revolution, it passed through an undocumented stretch of the nineteenth century before surfacing in the Paris collection of the decorator Georges Hoentschel, whose entire holding of French decorative art J. Pierpont Morgan bought in 1906 for four million francs and gave to the Metropolitan Museum, an acquisition that created the museum's first department of decorative arts. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **1788-1789** The French Crown (Louis XVI), Garde-Meuble de la Couronne `[documented]` (commission and delivery) Ordered 25 February 1788 as one of a supplementary batch of four armchairs completing a set Georges Jacob had begun supplying the previous year for the Salon des Jeux du Roi at Saint-Cloud, the gaming room Louis XVI and his court used for cards, billiards and trictrac. Jacob's own charge for cutting and joining the walnut frame was 24 livres; the carving, by a carver not named in the surviving accounts, cost 180 livres; the gilding, billed separately to Louis-Francois Chatard, came to 240 livres - 444 livres for the frame alone. The original upholstery, applied by Claude-Francois Capin (d. 1789), upholsterer to the Garde-Meuble, is recorded in the 1789 Saint-Cloud inventory as a grey-blue brocaded gros de Tours, a ribbed silk; none of that fabric survives on the chair today. In total Jacob supplied 62 pieces of seat furniture, including sixteen identical armchairs of this pattern, for the room. - **1789-1798** The French Crown, then the French state `[documented]` (revolution and state seizure) Louis XVI and the royal family were confined to the Tuileries from October 1789 and never occupied Saint-Cloud as a residence again after a brief stay in the summer of 1790. Following the abolition of the monarchy the chateau and its contents became state property. The National Convention decreed in June 1793 that the royal furniture collections were to be sold, and auctions of crown furniture ran from August 1793 (Versailles) and October 1793 (Marly) into 1794, reaching Saint-Cloud's furnishings from the spring of 1794 under the same programme, administered through the Garde-Meuble's own commissioners and public auctioneers rather than by any single named sale. The chateau's fabric, unlike some royal domains, was explicitly spared demolition: the Convention separately ruled that the park and building be preserved at the Republic's expense for public enjoyment. Despite the general 1793-94 furniture-sale programme, the Metropolitan Museum's own curatorial notes record that twelve of the gaming-room armchairs were still inventoried at the palace as late as the spring of 1798 (Year VI) - meaning this specific set of chairs was not necessarily swept up in the first wave of sales, and its exact removal date and mechanism are not established in the sources available to this record. - **1798-c. 1900** Unknown `[unknown]` (gap) No owner, sale, dealer or inventory placing this chair anywhere is documented for more than a century between its last recorded presence at Saint-Cloud (spring 1798) and its appearance in the Paris collection of Georges Hoentschel by 1908 at the latest. Saint-Cloud itself remained in government hands throughout this period - site of the 18 Brumaire coup in 1799, an imperial and then royal residence under Napoleon and the Restoration, and destroyed by fire during the Prussian shelling of 1870 - so the chair's departure from state hands could in principle have happened at any point across the Empire, the Restoration, the July Monarchy, the Second Empire or after the 1870 fire, including via disposal of superseded furniture when Napoleon refurnished the palace after 1802. None of these possibilities is documented for this specific chair. This is the weakest link in the chain and this record states that plainly rather than bridging it. - **c. 1900-1906** Georges Hoentschel (1855-1915), Paris `[documented]` (acquisition by a dealer-collector) Georges Hoentschel, a Paris decorator who ran the firm Maison Leys and furnished interiors in historic styles for wealthy clients, assembled a collection of more than 4,000 pieces of French decorative art - woodwork, furniture, metalwork, sculpture and textiles - which he used both as stock-in-trade and as study material, installed from 1903 in a museum-like display at 58 boulevard Flandrin, Paris. The 1908 published catalogue of the Hoentschel collection lists this chair's Saint-Cloud origin but, notably, neither its maker nor its date - the Jacob attribution and the 1788 date rest on the physical evidence on the chair itself (the stamp, the label and the notches), not on Hoentschel's own cataloguing. - **1906** J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) `[documented]` (purchase en bloc) Morgan bought the entire Hoentschel collection under a contract dated 27 April 1906, arranged through the London dealer George Durlacher, for four million French francs (contemporary newspapers reported the figure as roughly one million dollars). The collection was shipped from Le Havre in twelve consignments comprising 364 packing cases; the first left port on 12 January 1907, so delivery to New York continued into 1907 even though the purchase and gift are dated 1906. - **1906-present** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (gift) Credited by the Museum as the Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906 (accession 07.225.107). The gift of the Hoentschel woodwork and furniture, together with his medieval collection given in stages by Morgan and, after his death, by his son in 1916-17, created the Museum's first curatorial department of decorative arts, with Wilhelm R. Valentiner as its inaugural curator, and required a new wing designed by McKim, Mead and White that opened in 1910. ## Literature - Catalogue of the Hoentschel collection, Paris, 1908 (lists the chair's Saint-Cloud provenance without maker or date attribution). ## Open questions - Where was this chair between the spring-1798 inventory that still places it at Saint-Cloud and its documented appearance in Georges Hoentschel's Paris collection by 1908? More than a century is undocumented in the sources available to this record. - By what mechanism and in what year did this chair specifically leave state ownership - the general 1793-94 Convention furniture sales, a later disposal during Napoleon's post-1802 refurnishing of Saint-Cloud, or something else entirely? The Museum's own 1798 inventory note sits in tension with the generic Revolutionary-sale narrative and has not been reconciled here. - Where are the other fifteen armchairs from the same sixteen-chair Saint-Cloud order today? No comprehensive scholarly reconstruction of the set's dispersal was located. - Is accession 07.225.114 (object 189394) genuinely part of the same 1788 commission, as sometimes assumed in casual discussion? The Museum's own online record does not support this and this record treats the connection as unconfirmed. - Who carved the frame? The 180-livre carving charge is recorded without the carver's name in the sources consulted. - What price, if any, was allocated specifically to this one chair within Morgan's four-million-franc, multi-thousand-object purchase of the entire Hoentschel collection? No itemised valuation was found. ## Sources - [1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection object record, accession 07.225.107, object ID 189387 (title, medium, dimensions, credit line, gallery number, isPublicDomain). - [2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection API, object 189387, primary and additional images. - [3] Wikimedia Commons, File:Armchair (fauteuil) from Louis XVI's Salon des Jeux at Saint Cloud MET DP113960.jpg and MET DP113961.jpg, CC0, donated by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, carrying the Museum's own catalogue description including the cost breakdown in livres and the upholsterer Claude-Francois Capin. - [4] Sylvain Gaillard, doctoral thesis on the revolutionary sales of furniture from Versailles, Marly, Saint-Cloud and Bellevue, 1793-1795, Ecole nationale des chartes. - [5] Persee, 'Les commissaires-priseurs et les ventes revolutionnaires du mobilier royal', Bibliotheque de l'Ecole des chartes, 2012. - [6] Shannon Selin, 'What happened to the Palace of Saint-Cloud?', citing the 1793 Convention decree preserving the park and chateau at public expense, the royal family's 1790 stay, and the 1870 destruction. - [7] Wikipedia, 'Georges Hoentschel', for dates and the Metropolitan gift. Flagged as an encyclopaedic source to be replaced with Kisluk-Grosheide, Krohn and Leben, Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel and French Decorative Arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bard Graduate Center / Yale University Press, 2013). - [8] The Magazine Antiques, 'Georges Hoentschel and his world', on Hoentschel's career at Maison Leys, the scope of his collection, and the 1906 Morgan purchase. - [9] Bard Graduate Center, 'The Hoentschel Collection Comes to New York', giving the 27 April 1906 purchase contract, the four-million-franc price, the dealer George Durlacher, and the 364 packing cases shipped from Le Havre from January 1907. - [10] Enfilade (18th-century-focused decorative arts blog), 'Exhibition: Salvaging the Past: Georges Hoentschel', on the scale of the collection and its role founding the Met's decorative arts department. - [11] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, departmental history noting Wilhelm R. Valentiner as inaugural curator of decorative arts and the 1910 McKim, Mead and White wing. - [12] Le Magazine de Proantic, 'Louis-Francois Chatard, les peintres doreurs du Garde-Meuble de la Couronne sous Louis XVI', on the guild division between menuisier, carver and peintre-doreur and Chatard's role as principal gilding supplier to the Crown under Louis XVI. - [13] Napoleon.org, 'Domaine national de Saint-Cloud - Park and Historical Museum', on the 18 Brumaire coup at Saint-Cloud in 1799, the 1870 shelling and fire, and the site's current state as a national park. - [14] Wikipedia, 'Chateau de Saint-Cloud', for Marie-Antoinette's 1785 purchase of the chateau for 6,000,000 livres from Louis-Philippe, Duke of Orleans, and the criticism it drew. Flagged as an encyclopaedic source; a scholarly biography of Marie-Antoinette or a Chateau de Versailles/Saint-Cloud institutional history should replace it. - [15] Wikipedia, 'Georges Jacob', for the biography, guild reception in 1765, the 1796 bankruptcy, the firm's continuation under his sons as Jacob Freres and then Jacob-Desmalter et Cie, and his death in 1814. Flagged as an encyclopaedic source; Hector Lefuel's 1923 monograph on Jacob is the primary scholarly reference and should replace it. - [16] French Wikipedia, 'Georges Jacob (menuisier)', for the apprenticeship under Jean-Baptiste Lerouge, the 1765 maitrise, patronage from the comte de Provence, the collaboration with Jacques-Louis David, and the 1796 banqueroute. Flagged as an encyclopaedic source for the same reason as source 15. - [17] The Frame Blog / Klismos entry, on Georges Jacob's 1788 fabrication of Etruscan-style klismos furniture as studio props for Jacques-Louis David's 'The Lictors Bring to Brutus the Bodies of His Sons' (Paris Salons of 1789 and 1791). - [18] Wikipedia, 'Paris in the 18th century', for period wage figures (an unskilled male worker earning 20-30 sous a day, a skilled mason 50 sous, 20 sous to the livre). Flagged as an encyclopaedic source; a specialised study of ancien-regime Parisian wages (e.g. the Cambridge Journal of Economic History literature on six centuries of French real wages) should replace it. - [19] The J. Paul Getty Museum, 'Silk and Swan Feathers: A Luxurious 18th-Century Armchair', on a separate Georges Jacob bergere of about 1770-82, cited here only as a distinct comparandum, not as evidence about this chair. - [20] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Collection object record, accession 07.225.114, object ID 189394, checked and found NOT to carry a Jacob attribution, an 1788 date, or a Saint-Cloud provenance note in the Museum's own online record. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.