When you think about canapés and couture, you are probably thinking “fancy party.” Not so here, or not exactly. We’re talking about a sofa, or canapé in French, not the kind you eat. That, strictly speaking, is a savory topping on a piece of bread or toast, reputedly invented by a nineteenth-century French chef who thought such delicacies resembled a person sitting on a sofa. Ours is a delicacy of another sort, a canapé made for Marie Antoinette and recently reupholstered in silk-embroidered cotton hand-stitched by the needle-workers of Maison Lesage of Paris, long known for its embellishments to haute couture fashion.
The piece was originally supplied in 1779 as a daybed for the queen’s apartment at Versailles, but that plan was abandoned when room layouts were changed, and the frame was later transformed into a sofa by the royal menuisier Georges Jacob, whose name is stamped on the front rail. Its history after the French Revolution is murky at best; it may have been acquired by Gouverneur Morris (1752–1816), second ambassador to France from the United States, who acquired other pieces from the original suite, but there is no proof of this. It definitely came into the possession of Grace Graham Vanderbilt (Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt III; 1870–1953) at some point, as it was sold from her estate after her death, four years before coming to the Legion of Honor of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
The reupholstery project, nearly two decades in the making, began almost as soon as Martin Chapman arrived at the Legion of Honor as curator of European decorative arts and sculpture in 2006 (he became curator in charge of the department in 2010). The canapé’s then-upholstery struck him as seeming not right and requiring investigation. While more pressing responsibilities soon called, not least among them the conservation and reinstallation of the Salon Doré, formerly of Paris’s Hôtel de la Trémoille, and which was also designed during the reign of Louis XVI and first installed at the Legion of Honor in the early 1960s, he continued to contemplate and research the canapé.
When the Salon Doré project was completed in 2014, Chapman returned more fully to the sofa, and called on Xavier Bonnet, who had also been involved in the Salon Doré work, to take a look. Bonnet, a French art historian and upholsterer extraordinaire, with a passion for historical accuracy and authenticity that Chapman describes as “forensic,” took up the challenge. Beyond studying every remaining fiber, the yards of carving, painting, and gilding, and the multitude of tack holes in the sofa frame, Bonnet, as was his practice, dug deeply into the history of the sofa and related furniture.
Drawing on his wealth of knowledge and experience, and the evidence of the tack holes, he determined that the original upholstery fabric was not silk or satin but silk-embroidered cotton, which was Marie Antoinette’s preference and is documented by a set of furniture (now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art) made for her private chambers in the Château de Saint-Cloud—and for which she had done the embroidery of small flowers herself.
Digging further, Bonnet eventually turned up a previously unpublished eighteenth-century drawing in the Musée des arts décoratifs in Paris bearing not only Marie Antoinette’s cipher, but also scatterings of flowers akin to those seen on the Saint-Cloud furniture—roses, pansies, daffodils, and cornflowers, reflecting the queen’s love of nature and country living. Bonnet devised a scheme using this design, working with Lesage of Paris and the Paris trim makers Declercq Passementiers, but two issues quickly came up. The first was cost, so astronomical that Chapman suggested that perhaps the embroidery could be done more cheaply in India. “Lesage already does its embroidery in India!” Bonnet told him. The second was the bright colors Bonnet envisioned for the embroidery: “Do not worry, when completed they will be just right.”
But plans came to a halt when Bonnet died unexpectedly at only forty-eight in 2018. “I still mourn his loss—he was such an extraordinary talent,” Chapman says nearly six years later, “I wasn’t sure how to proceed, but decided it was best to follow his plan.” That meant bringing on Bonnet’s former assistant and colleague Amandine Cambet to work with the Fine Arts Museums’ team of conservators alongside Lesage and Declercq, and consulting with curators in France and elsewhere who had collaborated with Bonnet. Altogether, the actual work took until early this year. “It was truly a cooperative effort that could not have been achieved without so many generous and caring professionals working together in harmony to achieve what we hope is as close as possible to what the canapé looked like in Marie Antoinette’s time,” Chapman says, gratefully, of what was his swan song at the Fine Arts Museums. He retired in February, and, like the rest of us, now awaits the September reinstallation of the sofa as the highlight of the Legion of Honor’s French eighteenth-century gallery. A toast to the highest taste and fashion of its day.