The chair was once placed in the queen’s boudoir, located behind her bedroom.
The royal French artifact sold for €2.6 million ($2.8 million) at Sotheby’s auction in Paris earlier this month. The chair, made in around 1784-1785, belonged to the late Hubert Guerrand-Hermès’ collection.
He was a fifth-generation descendant of Thierry Hermès, founder of the French luxury house. Before his death in 2016, he amassed around 1,000 artworks and artifacts over his lifetime. His prized possessions were kept in his 18th-century mansion in Paris, the Hôtel de Lannion.
His collection spanned centuries and included royal furniture, rare books, and pieces by contemporary artists. The auction house sold 60 pieces last Thursday, December 14, totaling almost €23 million (around $25 million).
The Louis XVI gilt walnut chair once sat in Marie Antoinette’s boudoir, an intimate space located just behind her main bedroom.
According to The Times, it fetched the highest price ever for an 18th-century chair. This latest sale has proved the public’s ongoing fascination with the executed queen.
Born an archduchess of Austria, Marie Antoinette was only 14 years old when she married the future king of France. Four years later, she became queen when Louis XVI ascended the throne.
She was also the nation’s final queen, after the French Revolution successfully overthrew the monarchy in August 1792.
Since then, she spent the remainder of her life in Parisian prisons, including the Conciergerie where she was in solitary confinement. A few months after her husband’s execution, she was also guillotined in Paris in 1793.
According to Sotheby’s, the royal family’s personal furnishing testifies to the “extreme luxury with which the queen liked to surround herself, and which thus affirmed her most personal taste.”
Banner image via Sotheby’s website.
