Cupid Seated on a Garland

Unknown

1770–90 · Oil on canvas · European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

This overdoor painting of a cupid with quiver, floral wreath, and torch, seated on a garland of flowers suspended from two blue ribbons, was part of the model collection of woodwork, paneling, and seat furniture of Maison Leys. Maison Leys was a successful decorating business, located at the Place de la Madeleine in Paris. Since 1885 the business was directed by Georges Hoentschel who installed the collection in 1903 in a museum-like display at Boulevard Flandrin, Paris. Three years later, Hoentschel sold the collection to J. Pierpont Morgan who gave this overdoor with the rest of the decorator’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century objects to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1907. Still retaining a Maison Leys inventory label on its reverse, the painting has in the past been attributed to Le Riche, a painter who worked for Marie Antoinette at Versailles.

Artist

Unknown

Date

1770–90

Medium

Oil on canvas

Culture

French

Department

European Sculpture and Decorative Arts

Credit line

Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1906