European Decorative Arts, 1700–1800

Thirty rooms of furniture nobody sits on

The Louvre's 18th-century decorative arts collection takes up roughly thirty rooms on the first floor of the Sully Wing. Fourteen of those are period rooms — fully furnished spaces meant to approximate what an aristocratic interior actually looked like between the final decades of Louis XIV's reign and the Revolution. The rest display individual objects: porcelain, silverware, clocks, snuffboxes, scientific instruments. About 4,000 works altogether, overseen by two curators.

The rooms reopened after a decade-long renovation, with scenography by interior decorator Jacques Garcia. Garcia is a specialist in the 18th century, and it shows. He arranged the objects in context rather than isolation — chairs next to commodes next to tapestries, the way they would have been placed in an actual room. One particular result is the complete Hôtel Dangé-Villemaré drawing room, which hadn't been shown in full since the Louvre first acquired it in the 19th century.

The cabinetmakers who made it all

Four names come up over and over in these rooms. Charles Cressent worked under the Régence, producing furniture heavy with gilt bronze mounts and curving lines. Jean-François Oeben, German-born but trained in Paris, was appointed ébéniste du roi to Louis XV and is best known for his mechanical furniture — desks with hidden compartments and spring-loaded drawers. When Oeben died in 1763, his workshop passed to Jean-Henri Riesener, who finished the famous Bureau du Roi and became Marie Antoinette's preferred cabinetmaker. Martin Carlin, quieter in reputation, specialized in delicate furniture mounted with Sèvres porcelain plaques.

You can trace the shift in taste through these rooms almost physically. The heavy, symmetrical pieces from Louis XIV's court give way to the curves and asymmetry of the Rococo under Louis XV, and then snap back to straight lines and classical references under Louis XVI. The furniture tells you where French taste was heading before anyone says a word about it.

Royal manufactures and what they produced

The objects in these rooms came from France's state-sponsored manufactures, which operated as something between a luxury brand and a government program. Sèvres produced the porcelain. Les Gobelins and Beauvais wove the tapestries, including one in Room 612 that tells the story of Don Quixote. La Savonnerie made the rugs. Lyon supplied the silks. Each of these workshops had royal patronage, and their output went first to the court before reaching anyone else.

Room 619 has a potpourri vase shaped like a ship. Room 609 holds the Clock of the Creation of the World, a piece as theatrical as its name. The pair of 'eared' vases in Room 622 are Sèvres pieces of a form that was already considered unusual in the 18th century. A snuffbox with a portrait of Louis XV sits in Room 614, small enough to fit in a coat pocket but finished with the kind of detail you need to lean in to appreciate.

Marie Antoinette's things

Room 632 is dedicated to Marie Antoinette. The most striking piece here is her travel case, a portable box fitted out with writing materials, drawing supplies, a sewing kit, and pots for coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. It makes you realize how much logistics went into being a queen on the move. The room also holds furniture from her private apartments, including pieces by Riesener commissioned for her use at Versailles and the Tuileries.

Where it all came from

Much of the furniture was seized from royal residences after the Revolution: Versailles, the Tuileries, Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau. The rest came through purchases and donations over the following century. Isaac de Camondo gave his 18th-century collection to the Louvre in 1908. In 1922, the Baroness Salomon de Rothschild donated Renaissance artworks alongside 18th-century jewelry and porcelain.

Some rooms display objects from a single source. The drawing room of the Château d'Abondant. The Parisian mansion of financier Marquet de Peyre. The Turkish rooms that the Comte d'Artois, Louis XVI's brother, had built at Versailles. Room 630 still has an armchair from those Turkish rooms. The chair survived the Revolution, several changes of government, and a world war before ending up behind glass on the first floor of the Sully Wing.