How the Collection was Formed

Custodian of the Crown Jewels of France and the illustrated vases collected during the XIIth century by Abbot Suger, added to the Louvre in 1793, the Department of Objets d'Art can also consider itself one of the heirs to the Crown Furniture Repository, of which a large proportion of the collections came to the Louvre in 1796.
Similarly to the other departments, it also benefited from seizures at the time of the Revolution.

Edme-Antoine Durand in 1825 and Pierre Révoil in 1828 both sold the Louvre their representative collections of Medieval and Renaissance arts, forming a coherent ensemble of items in all manner of materials. In 1830 the Treasury of the Order of the Holy Ghost, built up by Henri III and remaining almost intact, came in its turn into the Louvre. The Second Empire saw a new and spectacular extension to the collection, with the creation in 1852 of the musée des Souverains, the donation in 1856 of the Charles Sauvageot collection, and in 1862 the addition of the Campana majolica collection. The arrangement of the museum become more structured between 1861 and 1863, when the galerie d'Apollon was in turn made into an exhibition gallery.

After 1870, the collections of the Musée des Souverains regained their original destination, but the musem receives furniture and objects from de Saint-Cloud and Tuileries palaces. In 1901, the collection of XVIIth and XVIIIth centuries is inaugurated.

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