Set of Four Armchairs and Settee (c. 1715): Art, History and Details

Set of Four Armchairs and Settee (c. 1715) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Royal Savonnerie Manufactory, Chaillot Workshops (French, est. 1627).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

These chairs belong to a suite that includes a settee (also in the CMA’s collection) and a tapestry made for a count and countess to mark their wedding in 1717. Furniture of this scale was usually placed against the wall in grand reception halls, more as a display of wealth than for use. Upholstered in Savonnerie tapestries, this suite was among the most treasured and expensive example anyone could own and was typically reserved for royalty. To add decorative and intellectual interest to the textiles, weavers incorporated symbols depicting various stories from the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine, published from 1668 to 1694 and largely adapted from Aesop and other early storytellers.

Object facts

• Title: Set of Four Armchairs and Settee
• Date: c. 1715
• Creator attribution: Royal Savonnerie Manufactory, Chaillot Workshops (French, est. 1627)
• Culture: France
• Type: Furniture and woodwork
• Technique: carved wood, Savonnerie knotted-pile (symmetrical rug knot) upholstery; wool, hemp
• Dimensions: Overall: 120 x 201.3 x 55.9 cm (47 1/4 x 79 1/4 x 22 in.)
• Collection: Furniture
• Department: Decorative Art and Design
• Accession number: 1947.183

A detail from the museum

The Savonnerie factory can trace its origins to a small carpet studio which set up shop in 1615 south of Paris in a factory that had formerly made soap (savon in French), hence the name Savonnerie.

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Milliken, William. "A Set of Furniture Upholstered in Savonnerie Tapestry." The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 35, no. 3 (March 1948): 40, 42-43, 45-46.
• The Cleveland Museum of Art. The Cleveland Museum of Art Handbook. Cleveland, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1958.
• Bidwell, Frederick E., and Leslie Cade. The CMA Companion: A Guide to the Cleveland Museum of Art. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in association with New York, NY: Scala Arts Publishers, 2014.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.