The Sun King's Silver: A Technical Study of the Silver Furnishings of Louis XIV

Project

This project is an artisanal reinterpretation of the archive surrounding the famously enigmatic lost silver furnishings made for Louis XIV by royal artisans between 1666 and 1689. The research for this project was undertaken during a fellowship at the Voltaire Foundation at the University of Oxford and was funded by an Endeavour Research Fellowship awarded by the Australian Department of Education in 2018. The first publications stemming from the project are forthcoming in 2022.

The Silver Furnishings of Louis XIV

In December 1689, Louis XIV announced that his vast collection of silver furnishings was to be sent to the Royal Mint to be converted into bullion. Within six months, over a thousand pieces, approximately twenty tonnes of silver, had been melted down: tables, stools, chandeliers, guéridons, mirrors, censers, ewers, basins and more.

The greater part of this collection had been fabricated by royal artisans only within the preceding two decades as one component of unified decorative scheme of paintings, sculpture, tapestries and decorative arts in the extraordinary artistic program engineered by the Superintendent of the King’s Buildings, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and overseen by First Painter to the King, Charles Le Brun. The king’s collection had been widely admired by visitors to the French court and inspired a fashion for silver furnishings in foreign European courts. Soon after their downcycling into bullion, the French furnishings took on an almost legendary status and in the subsequent popular and scholarly narrative of the reign and decorative arts achievements of Louis XIV, the silver furnishings have been continually evoked as a symbol of the golden age of his reign.

Despite their fame, with no surviving pieces, the lost furnishings have left only tantalising traces in the archive. While a handful of drawings survive, most representations of the pieces in paintings and tapestries are inaccurate, and for the most part we are left with limited documentary evidence which includes descriptions, weights and dimensions of some pieces, and accounts of payments to artisans involved in their fabrication. Scholars have drawn on these limited sources to reconstruct something of the role of the furnishings in the royal decorative scheme and to understand the circumstances surrounding their production within the community of royal artisans. This study contributes to this body of knowledge by reconstructing the chaîne opératoire of their fabrication and evoking the materiality of these lost masterpieces.

 

Silversmithing Practices of Louis XIV’s Royal Goldsmiths

One aspect of this project has been an artisanal interpretation of the probate inventories of Louis XIV’s royal goldsmiths, the Orfèvres du roi. These documents provide comprehensive lists of the workshop equipment that each man owned at his death, providing an intimate insight into each man’s artisanal practices. To a great extent, these silversmithing techniques are identical to traditional silversmithing techniques that are practiced by silversmiths today. In these videos, I demonstrate a small selection of these techniques.
Raising a Vase on a Horned Stake

Each goldsmith owned an abundance of horned silversmithing stakes (bigornes) and silversmithing hammers (marteaux à bouge, marteaux à chever and others simply names marteaux). Here I demonstrate how a raising hammer and a horned stake are used to raise sheet metal into a vase.

Refining a Curve in a Brass Vessel’s Profile on a Ball Stake

Another type of stake used by the royal goldsmiths was a ball stake (boulle). Here I show how a ball stake can be used to refine a curve in the profile of a raised vessel using a planishing hammer (marteau à planir).

Drawing Silver Wire on a Draw Bench

Several of the royal goldsmiths owned draw benches (bancs à tirer) and draw plates (filiere/filiere à tirer) for drawing metal rods down into wire. Engravings of draw benches and draw plates in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751-1752) show that these early modern tools were virtually identical to those used today. Here I demonstrate how silversmiths use draw plates and draw benches to draw down wire.

Image Attributions

After Claude Ballin (attributed), Silver Table, Paris, late seventeenth century. Pen with black ink and bistre on paper, 40 x 56 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMH THC 1098. Photo Cecilia Heisser, public domain.

Claude Ballin or Nicholas Delaunay, Silver Guéridon with Two Alternative Feet, Paris, mid- to late-seventeenth century. Pen with black ink and grey wash on paper, 49 x 32 cm. Nationalmuseum, Stockholm, NMH CC 2419. Photo Cecilia Heisser, public domain.