Exhibition catalogue Decorative furnishings and Objets d'art, Louvre Museum

A broad perspective on interior decoration, luxury goods, and the art market is offered through lavish furniture by the likes of André-Charles Boulle and Charles Cressent during the Régence, through extravagant dinner services, and through the magnificent porcelain and tapestries produced by the royal manufactories, constituting a "moment of perfection in French art" that lasted until the Revolution.

The Louvre's new rooms devoted to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century decorative arts opened in May 2014. Some two thousand items are displayed in nearly twenty thousand square feet of exhibition space, representing one of the world's finest collections of furnishings and objets d'art from the reign of Louis XIV through that of Louis XVI.

The new galleries are organized chronologically and are punctuated by spectacular period rooms that recreate the magnificent wood-paneled interiors of lavish residences and princely palaces in eighteenth-century Paris. These reconstitutions of a bygone period provide the setting for truly remarkable objets d'art from the Louvre's Department of Decorative Arts-now placed in their original intellectual and material context, these items recreate a vanished atmosphere and finally reveal their full meaning as well as their full beauty.