HIDDEN in Plain Sight

T&C was invited into the private archives and secret workshops of Paris, to glimpse the treasures that have made this city famous for its style and craftsmanship. It's a reputation worth fighting for.

- PAUL TULLIS

The history of the French monarchy involves a long succession of Louises, one following the other, but in 1648 the country was between kings. Louis XIII had died five years earlier, when Louis XIV was just four years old. The country, therefore, was ruled by the widow of the former and mother of the latter, Anne of Austria, whose frosty relationship with her husband (they wed when they were 14) foreshadowed the one between their great-great-greatgreat-grandson, Louis XVI, and another Austrian, Marie Antoinette. Anne, like Marie Antoinette, is a much scorned figure only recently subject to attempts at rehabilitation. As sister to the king of Spain, her loyalty to France was questioned, and she was suspected of having secretly wed her chief advisor. But with a stroke of the pen at Paris’s Palais Royal in January 1648, Anne established a legacy as lasting as anything her husband did: She approved the founding of the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture, presaging the reputation as patron of the arts for which her child, the Sun King, would be celebrated for centuries to follow.

The driving force behind the academy was Charles Le Brun (he eventually became its director). One of many academy members who worked in artisanal crafts as well as painting, he would later design interiors for Versailles and Paris mansions including the Hôtel de la Rivière, on what is today known as the Place des Vosges. One room Le Brun created for the hôtel, the study, is considered a masterwork of gilding, with the paint applied directly to the masonry. The room was later disassembled and reconstructed around the corner, inside the Musée Carnavalet, the museum of Paris’s history.