Woven Power at The Met : The King's Carpet
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has announced its upcoming exhibition, A King’s Carpet: Louis XIV and the Savonnerie, a landmark presentation revealing the remarkable story behind the monumental carpets commissioned for the Louvre’s Grande Galerie, on view September 8, 2026–March 5, 2028 at The Met Fifth Avenue.
In 1668, King Louis XIV and his chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, launched one of the most audacious decorative arts commissions in history: an enormous series of 92 woven carpets designed to span the full 440-meter length of the Louvre’s Grande Galerie. Intended to dazzle visiting dignitaries and foreign ambassadors with an uninterrupted expanse of deep-pile French luxury, the grand commission stood as an unprecedented statement of royal ambition and craftsmanship.
A central thread of the exhibition is the extraordinary scale and technique perfected by the Savonnerie manufactory, which transformed European carpet design from thin, imported luxury accents into expressive works of grand Baroque art.
Although designed to form a single visual tapestry six times the length of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors, the grand vision was never realized in full. As royal priorities and budgets shifted toward the expansion of Versailles, the Louvre project was ultimately set aside, leaving these masterworks stored, gifted to foreign monarchs, or dispersed during the French Revolution.
Organized within The Met's Wrightsman Galleries, A King’s Carpet pairs surviving woven masterworks and historic archival drawings with an active, in-gallery conservation studio, offering visitors a rare glimpse into the modern preservation techniques safeguarding these 350-year-old royal treasures.
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