This is one of ninety-three carpets commissioned by Louis XIV for the long gallery that joined the Louvre and Tuileries palaces in Paris. Among the grandest weaving projects in European history, the scheme required carpets of the then-unprecedented length of over 29 feet each to be laid in two rows along the 1,450-foot gallery. Using specially built large looms housed in newly constructed buildings, two rival workshops in the royal Savonnerie carpet manufactory worked simultaneously on the project from 1668 to 1685. In scale and splendor the suite of carpets is comparable to the king's other celebrated achievements, such as the gardens at Versailles. The center of the present carpet, twenty-sixth in the series, is filled with four of the king's double-L monograms intertwined beneath crowns; a crowned globe inscribed with the royal motto and flanked by eagles appears at each end. This carpet, which has been shortened at one end with the border reattached, was one of a pair of the same design. Katherine B. Hiesinger, from Philadelphia Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections (1995), p.134.