The Four Ages: The Marriage of Antoinette de Bertier de Sauvigny to the Marquis de la Bourdonnaye (Les Quatre Ages: La Promenade)

This tapestry is part of a set called "The Four Ages," which also includes "Motherhood and Infancy," "The Study of the Globe," and "The Pleasures of Youth." Woven between 1778 and 1780 at the royal factory at Beauvais, France, one of the leading tapestry workshops of the eighteenth century, these tapestries are unique.

The tapestries were commissioned by Louis Benigne de Bertier de Sauvigny, an administrative official in the court of King Louis XVI, on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage. This series marks one of the few instances of tapestry designs being executed only once, and it contains a remarkable set of family portraits. De Sauvigny, his wife Marie-Josèphe Foullon, her father Joseph-Francois Foullon, and the de Sauvigny children, including Antoinette, Amelie, Benigne, Bernarde, Anne-Pierre and Antoine, can be recognized in the four tapestries.

In "The Marriage," the young bride and groom, Antoinette de Bertier de Sauvigny and the Marquis de la Bourdonnaye, are descending the stairs of a country church. Behind them are the bride’s father and a family member who was an abbot and may have performed the ceremony. Each member of the wedding party is fashionably dressed in sumptuous fabrics, in pointed contrast to the beggar, his wife, and child in the foreground. These remarkable tapestries provide a glimpse into the luxurious world of the French aristocracy in the final decade before the Revolution.

Two members of the wedding party depicted here, Louis Benigne de Bertier de Sauvigny, the father of the bride, and Joseph-Francois Foullon, de Sauvigny's father-in-law, were two of the first victims of the French Revolution, both hanged in Paris on July 2, 1789, shortly after the storming of the Bastille.