“Let them eat cake,” Marie Antoinette’s infamous — and perhaps apocryphal — line that became shorthand for the rich being out of touch with the masses, resonates loudly in the divided America of 2024.
The phrase has become a meme that’s helped keep the doomed queen of France in the public imagination for the past 231 years, often depicted in images reclining in luxurious repose on a fainting couch. For a team of art historians and conservators, one such couch has become an object of obsession.
Jane Williams, director of conservation at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, along with a team of researchers, conservationists, and seamstresses, has worked to bring the piece to the floors of the Legion of Honor after the couch spent more than half a century in the museum’s storage.
“This piece of furniture has a very complicated history,” Williams said. Commissioned for Versailles in 1779, it was included in an inventory of furniture taken from the palace shared by Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, a few months before their heads were chopped off in a public square in Paris by French revolutionaries.
“For the lavish furniture of the last tyrants of France,” read the report, “a general inventory will be made for the sale of the current items of furniture estimated to be worth less than a thousand livres.”
More than 17,000 objects were sold in lots to raise money for the state. Gilded clocks, tapestries, jewels, art, and Europe’s finest furniture were dispersed across the world.
Some of these objects were taken by Napoleon; others found their way to the homes of English and German aristocrats and American ambassadors. But Antoinette’s couch found its way, eventually, to San Francisco.
Likely moving from one rich estate to the next, the couch was first it was sawed in half and reupholstered several times before making its way to the historical museum at Lands End.
In what Williams called one of the museum’s most ambitious efforts and a longtime passion project for Martin Chapman, the now-retired curator in charge of European decorative arts and sculpture, the museum began the delicate work of restoring the couch in 2006. More than a dozen people were involved, from historians who traced the couch’s provenance to conservationists and chemists like Williams who worked to restore its trim through X-ray radiography. Replicas of the peonies, roses, pansies, daffodils, and cornflowers that line the white cushions were embroidered by a centennial French company specializing in haute couture.
Now, after 18 years of research and restoration, the piece is considered as close to its original form as possible — a couch truly fit for a queen.
Much of its history is unknown, including when it left France or whether Antoinette ever actually laid down on it. The museum purchased it at an auction in 1957, when an FAMSF employee recognized its significance and purchased it for the collection.
The museum has shown it a few times over the past 67 years with various upholstery jobs, each time revealing new details about the piece’s past but never fully addressing the prior damage and necessary restoration. The recent finishing touches are thanks to a large donation from the Al Thani Collection Foundation and the European Decorative Arts Council.
“This would be something we could not we could not afford to do without these resources,” Williams said.
For those who understand how much work goes into restoring a piece of furniture of this quality and historical relevance, seeing the couch in real life was profound.
“I was just in pure delight,” said Leea Kramer, who studies decorative arts and embroidered French furniture, and who was at the museum last week. “Normally, I have to go to New York to study objects like this, and you can’t see them up close because they’re in a period room. It was really nice to go right up there at the Legion and see the embroidery, the woodwork.”
“The history of these items isn’t settled,” Kramer added. “For the Legion to be leading this project — I think it’s really important that a museum like the Legion is taking that on and investing in it.”
Amid political and social tumult in San Francisco, where so many are seeking refuge, the Legion of Honor will host a celebration on Saturday, Nov. 9, for its 100th anniversary. Admission is free through Monday. The event will feature live music —and more than 100 cakes for you to eat.