Palace of Versailles - Salon de la Paix

Located on the first floor of the main building of the Château de Versailles, the Salon de la Paix is the junction between the Hall of Mirrors and the Queen's Great Apartments. Its decoration, designed by Jules Hardouin Mansart, and the paintings on the vault by Charles Le Brun, were commissioned in 1678 by Louis XVI to celebrate France's victory in the Dutch War.

In 2018, the Atelier de Ricou was entrusted, following a call for tenders, with the restoration of the stucco and gilded lead decorations, of the door on the Queen's Chamber side and of the Crusaders. We carried out cleaning and purging operations, consolidation, filling in and restitution of incomplete carved elements, gilding and painting, retouching in faux-marble.

This operation was carried out in two phases between 2018 and 2019, interspersed with our intervention in the Queen's Guard Room (see restoration here). These two large-scale projects contributed to the development of an article on the materials used in the Château's decorations in the magazine Versailles Notebooks (read article here).