FIRST QUARTER 18TH CENTURY

This panel is designed in the Louis Quatorze Roman fashion to evoke the poets Ver perpetuum or an everlasting Spring Season. Flora's flowers garland a sacred krater-shaped urn and the shell-capped trellised triumphal-arch that suspends its baldachino and supports a squirrel and heron. Roman foliage wraps the golden urns altar pedestal, whose veil festooned, reed-scallop and draco-winged lambrequin frames a plinth-supported basket. Its triumphal laurel border, entwined with a pearled and golden ribbon recalling the nature deity Venus, is clasped by acanthus enriched with the deity's foliated and fretted shells. It combines elements from the works of the floral artist Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (d.1728) with that of the artists/dessinateurs Jean Bérain (d.1711), who was appointed Dessinateur de la Chambre et du Cabinet du Roi, in 1674 and his son Jean Bérain II (d.1726), who succeeded to his court post in 1704 and designed tapestries and embroideries. The fashion was popularized around 1700 by Daniel Marot's, Nouveaux Livre de Tableaux de Portes, et Cheminee, utiles aux Paintres en fleurs. This pattern of hanging has been associated with the work of the religious community of Saint Cyr in Noisy (Louis X1V: Fastes et Decors, Musee des Arts Decoratifs, Paris, 1960, nos. 787-90).