by Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell

The Huntington recently acquired a piece of a puzzle dating back to the time of France’s Louis XIV. At first glance, the jagged patchwork of 17th-century carpet—held together with fat, clumsy stitches à la Frankenstein and shedding its knots like wooly dandruff—appears to be the detritus of an extreme home makeover gone horribly wrong. It’s hard to believe these bits of wool once felt the footsteps of kings and revolutionaries.

But the patchwork of carpet fragments comprises rare remnants from one of the most famous interior decoration schemes in history. Measuring about 35 by 56 inches, it is an assemblage of long-lost pieces of Astrology, one of two 17th-century French carpets in the Huntington collection. Astrology and the other carpet—Music—were part of a series of 93 carpets once intended to furnish the Grand Gallery of the Louvre, the former French royal palace that became a museum in 1793. The commission, initiated around 1665 by the Sun King—as Louis XIV (1638–1715) was known—and his finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, was intended to unify the gallery’s vast, high-ceilinged interior, which stretches along the banks of the Seine for 1,460 feet, longer than four football fields. (The gallery is well known today as the setting of the opening scenes of The Da Vinci Code.)

How did an illustrious object like Astrology suffer such a fate? Charissa Bremer-David, associate curator of decorative arts at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and independent textile conservator Sharon Shore began unraveling the carpet’s knotty history in the spring of 2003. They were conducting research on the Huntington’s textile collection; their findings will be published in a forthcoming French art catalog.

“On one day, I’d be on a ladder or lift many feet in the air, looking at a tapestry in weak light,” Shore recalls. “The next day, I’d be literally down on my hands and knees with my derriere sticking up in the air.” Bremer-David and Shore pored over every inch of Astrology and Music, uncovering evidence of multiple campaigns of alteration and restoration. As they concluded their work in late 2004, The Huntington got word that a group of some missing pieces of Astrology had survived all these years in the archive of Maison Hamot, a Paris textile firm established in 1762. Bremer-David and Shore soon found out how close they had come to piecing together the carpet’s history.

Long before they heard from Maison Hamot, Bremer-David and Shore had started to examine the history of Astrology and Music. They began with the more well-known history of the Sun King’s ambitious commission before delving into the archival and physical histories of the two carpets. For the unprecedented task of carpeting the Grand Gallery, Louis XIV had turned to the Savonnerie Manufactory, the royal carpet-making workshop housed in a former soap factory on the outskirts of Paris. The king’s pet project would keep the Savonnerie looms busy for decades. A skilled craftsman could produce about two and a half yards of plain carpet per year; intricate patterns like those required for the Grand Gallery took much longer. The Huntington examples contain up to 132 Turkish knots per square inch, creating astonishingly intricate patterns.

The architect Louis Le Vau and the painter Charles Le Brun collaborated on the designs for the carpets. Mixing classical mythology, religious symbolism, and allegory, they celebrated the virtues and glories of the king’s reign. Their designs called for rich black backgrounds, the botanical flair of acanthus scrolls, gold borders, and the symmetrical placement of panels, bas-reliefs, and cartouches.

It would have been a dazzling artistic and technological achievement. Unfortunately, the ambitious plan to carpet the Grand Gallery never came to fruition. By the time 92 of the 93 carpets had rolled off the looms in 1689, the king had transplanted the court to his newly renovated country château, Versailles, and lost interest in decorating the Louvre. Although the Savonnerie manufactory eventually completed all 93 carpets, they were never displayed together as originally intended, but went into storage to be used as needed in the various royal residences. The carpets were, nevertheless, highly prized, and when the king gave away 10 as diplomatic gifts, replacements were immediately made, making a total of 103. Of those, only 48 are intact today, scattered among museums and private collections around the world. Another 18, including the two Huntington carpets, survive in an altered state. The remaining 37 are known only by fragments or written descriptions.

During three reigns, from Louis XIV to Louis XVI, the carpets found their way out of storage for special occasions and holidays. Astrology, for example, reappeared for the fateful meeting of the Estates-General—or general assembly—at Versailles in 1789. But during the public sale of the royal furniture following the French Revolution, the carpets were dispersed, and many suffered damage. The Revolutionary government required buyers to promise to remove all vestiges of the old regime from their purchases. Thus, royal crests, monograms, and symbols were removed or replaced with innocuous motifs. Bremer-David and Shore already had established that the central globe of Astrology originally had been surrounded by a ribbon of the royal Order of the Holy Spirit, which was replaced by an incongruous garland of oranges. Music has lost its fleurs-de-lys and royal monograms. A similar fate befell the Huntington’s five-piece tapestry suite The Noble Pastorale, which also has a royal provenance. Each shows evidence of alteration in the top center, where the royal crest would have been displayed.

Some of the royal furniture ended up in the offices of new government ministries or in the homes of creditors of the bankrupt monarchy. Under the Directoire government (1795–99), Astrology decorated the offices of the Ministry of Justice. Further alteration ensued when new owners reshaped these carpets—scaled for the vast expanses of the Grand Gallery—to fit the smaller interiors of offices and private residences. Both Huntington examples reflect such changes. Astrology has lost about three feet in length, including a large panel showing a female figure representing Astrology. About 18 inches of depth at the other end have been replaced, giving the figure of Dusk an elongated profile (see detail, page 1). Music has lost about three feet in length, much of it cut from the middle of the carpet, and eight inches in width; two feet have been reknotted, including the head of the female figure representing Music. The second figure, Euterpe, the muse of Music, has been replaced by a cartouche from an entirely different carpet in the series.

After the Directoire era, the Huntington carpets disappeared for more than a century. In 1911, they resurfaced at another illustrious address, 14 Princes Gate, the London home of American financier and art collector J. Pierpont Morgan. Morgan had large chunks of both carpets cut out so they would fit around his fireplaces, a sad but common fate. Despite these alterations, Arabella Huntington admired the carpets when she visited Morgan, paying particular attention to the larger carpet, Astrology. Arabella was an avid collector of French decorative arts, and she especially liked objects with a royal provenance.

When Morgan’s carpets came on the market after his death in 1913, the Huntingtons snapped them up for $110,000. The dealer, Mitchell Samuels of French & Company, arranged the cleaning, repair, and lining of the carpets before shipping them to San Marino. Bremer-David and Shore speculate that it was during this round of repairs that two large and five smaller pieces were removed from Astrology and the carpet returned to its earlier rectangular shape. The carpet now measures approximately 25 by 16.5 feet. When The Huntington opened as a museum in 1928, both carpets adorned the floors of the large library at the east end of the Huntington house, where they rested peacefully until 2003, when Bremer-David and Shore entered the picture.

For two weeks, Bremer-David and Shore pored over every inch of the carpets, side by side on their hands and knees, using dental tools and a spatula to push back the dense pile so they could count the knots and glimpse the dizaines, the darker warp threads indicating a 10-knot unit. Savonnerie weavers had been paid for every 100 knots, and the dizaines helped them keep track of their earnings. It was difficult to see the dizaines in the intricate Astrology carpet, as they were completely obscured by the knots, but Bremer-David and Shore hypothesized that they were light brown, which would date the carpet to the 1670s, the only period when the Savonnerie Manufactory used the light brown color for that purpose. Bremer-David combed through the records of the Mobilier National (the royal furniture warehouse) and surviving palace inventories stored in the French national archives to find early descriptions of the carpets and trace their whereabouts between their creation and the French Revolution. Like a detective building her case, she compared the carpets to duplicate versions and searched museum and auction catalogs for clues.

The fragments came to light in early 2005 when the Maison Hamot textile firm liquidated its inventory and archives through the Paris auction house Drouot. The auction included several Savonnerie carpet remnants from the period of Louis XIV. Experts at Drouot identified the fragments as missing pieces of the Huntington’s Astrology carpet. Only two versions of that carpet had been completed; the other, now in the Mobilier National Museum’s collection, is largely intact with a violet background color in the central reserve, whereas the Huntington’s is rose seiche (dried roses), like the background of surviving fragments. Separately, the pieces visually complete the top of the head and arm of the figure of Dusk and some background now filled by re-created inserts.

It is likely that Maison Hamot undertook the replacement of damaged sections of the Huntington carpet at some point in its history (possibly around the time of Morgan’s sale) and retained the unused portions. Seven pieces from the area around Dusk had been crudely sewn together in a long rectangle, with the design forming a mirror image. The Huntington purchased the pieces for its collection, allowing Bremer-David and Shore to delve more deeply into the carpet’s rich history. Shore is grateful that someone had the foresight to sew the fragments together. “Care was taken not to lose the original pieces,” she says. “They didn’t just blithely cut them off and throw them away.”

The recovered remnants acted as a kind of textile DNA, helping Bremer-David and Shore understand the construction and original appearance of the carpet. “Laying them right on the carpet allowed us to see exactly the color change and the rates of fading between the reknotted sections and the original,” Bremer-David explains. They were elated to see the frayed ends of the light brown dizaines clearly visible among the prevailing off-white warps around the roughly hewn edges of the pieces, confirming their hypothesis about the carpet’s date. Though the pieces have suffered obvious damage, their colors are far more vibrant than those of the faded carpet, which has been on display since The Huntington opened to the public in 1928. (The carpets have always been cordoned off to prohibit foot traffic. They are now in storage, awaiting the reopening of the house after renovations are completed in 2008.) Against the rich, velvety black background, the pink marbled scrolls and arabesque rinceaux stand out in all their baroque splendor. Dusk’s face in this original version is not awkwardly elongated, and her uplifted eyes are more soulful than in the later rendering. The vases on either side of her are filled with lush, almost three-dimensional fruits—grapes, bursting pomegranates, pears, and apples—rather than the fussy pastel flowers of the altered version. But what is most striking about the pieces is not their beauty, but their imperfection. Even in such a small area, it is evident that the pattern is slightly asymmetrical and irregular, as only handmade textiles can be. It is a powerful contrast to the cold perfection of today’s mechanized, computer-designed textiles.

The Huntington has no plans to restore Astrology to its original appearance. Even if the other pieces removed from the carpet over the years should surface, the task would be more destructive than beneficial. Furthermore, restoring the carpet would erase material evidence of its fascinating history, which is as important as the object itself.

Kimberly Chrisman-Campbell is a Mellon Foundation Curatorial Fellow in French art at The Huntington. She would like to acknowledge Charissa Bremer-David and Sharon Shore, whose entry in the upcoming French art catalog served as a source for this article.