Attingham alumni visit (details to be confirmed).
1-8 February 2026, Grand Palais, Paris
The Grand Palais in Paris is mounting a short-run special exhibition about Louis XIV’s Grande Galerie Savonnerie carpets, entitled Le trésor retrouvé du Roi-Soleil. Curated by Emmanuelle Federspiel and Antonin Macé de Lépinay of the Mobilier national and Wolf Burchard of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and trustee of The Attingham Trust, the exhibition will run for a week from February 1-8, 2026, and – for the first time ever – show 30 Grande Galerie carpets rolled out together, as originally intended, when they were made more than 350 years ago. This will amount to more than 140 meters (twice the length of the Hall of Mirrors) of luxurious, seventeenth-century royal floor covering, laid out at the visitor’s feet.
‘The King’s Carpet’, or le tapis du roi, was an enormous rug made up of 92 individual pieces that were intended to cover the entire span of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre (442 meter; 1450 feet). The story of Louis XIV’s Savonnerie carpets is a completely unique chapter in the history of art. Their ostentatious and highly sophisticated design makes them the most Baroque works of art ever produced for the French court. It took two manufactories, Dupont and Lourdet, and more than 25 years to complete the ambitious scheme. Yet, despite the monumental expense and energy lavished on this spectacular royal commission, Louis XIV appears never to have used the carpets. With time, the notion of ‘one’ carpet was forgotten, and individual pieces were given away as diplomatic gifts, and others lost in the aftermath of the French Revolution.
Some carpets and carpet fragments later found their way into the distinguished homes of English and American collectors, most notably the Rothschilds, Vanderbilts, J. P. Morgan and Mrs Charles Wrightsman. The altered and dispersed carpets thus became an enormous jigsaw puzzle, which Emmanuelle Federspiel, Antonin Macé de Lepinay and Wolf Burchard are reconstructing, carpet by carpet, fragment by fragment. Their research will be published in a new monograph, Les tapis du Roi-Soleil (2026).
The Mobilier national’s one-week event will be followed by an exhibition of Louis XIV Savonnerie carpets in the Wrightsman Galleries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, curated by Wolf Burchard and Elizabeth Cleland, and opening in autumn 2026.
Image: Grande Galerie Savonnerie carpet no. 58, “Love”, delivered by the widow of Lourdet on 12 January 1679, Mobilier national, Paris, GMT 2036 (9,52 x 4,52 m); previously in the office of the President of the French Republic at the Elysée Palace.