The Manot bed that made it from a Herefordshire attic to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, courtesy of Country Life

This is the story of how an English bed conceived by a French designer ended up in an American museum. It starts in Paris, where the young Huguenot Daniel Marot was working as an engraver at the Manufacture des Gobelins. He had just begun making his name, reproducing the works of Jean Bérain, one of Louis XIV’s leading designers, when, in 1681, the King started persecuting the Huguenots, eventually revoking the Edict of Nantes, which for the previous 87 years had given French Protestants the right to practise their religion.

During those troubled years, Marot fled the country and moved to Holland, where he championed the flamboyant, ornate decorating style that had been popular at Versailles. Soon, the Frenchman’s work caught the eye of William of Orange, for whom he created many of the interiors of Paleis Het Loo in Apeldoorn. When William and Mary ascended to the British throne, Marot followed them across the North Sea, working primarily at Hampton Court Palace, where he designed, among other furniture, theatrical beds full of architectural details for the State Rooms.

At another Hampton Court, near Leominster in Herefordshire, one of William III’s courtiers, Thomas, Baron Coningsby, was also looking for suitable state beds. With their gigantic (and costly) proportions, they doubled up as status symbols. Taking inspiration from the ‘vast and sumptuous’ Marot four-poster at the Thames-side palace must have seemed an obvious choice, although Coningsby favoured a design tweak, ‘that of fretting out immense and elaborate scrolls in the white wood that composes the substance of these beds, onto which the damask is glued,’ as Architectural Editor Henry Avray Tipping explained in Country Life in 1911.

The baron had not one, but two four posters made in about 1698, one bedecked in blue silk damask for himself, the other in red for the King, were he ever to visit. ‘So fine a bed of the Marot type in such unusually perfect state is rare indeed,’ said Tipping of the blue version.

It was all the more surprising because the four-poster bed — too monumental for early-20th-century rooms at 12ft high — had long been stored in one of the house’s attics, that ‘hospital for dusty cast-offs’ where Tipping had spotted it and from which he had rescued it so it could be photographed in Country Life. He may not have realised it then, but his eagle eye started a chain of events that saw the blue state bed leave its ancestral home, where it had stayed undisturbed for centuries despite changes of ownership, for the USA (with the red four poster heading for The Netherlands and the Paleis Het Loo).

In 1925, 14 years after that magazine article, the blue bed was bought by a Bond Street dealer, who, in turn, sold it to American magnate William Randolph Hearst. Perhaps Hearst had wanted it for St Donat’s, then his castle in Glamorgan, Wales, or perhaps for his Californian home. Either way, he never used it. The bed remained in its crate until 1968, when Hearst’s son, William Randolph Jnr, presented it to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Restoration only started in 1986 and by then, wrote William Rieder in European Furniture in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, ‘the bed was in a considerably less perfect state than it had been in 1911’, requiring not only thorough conservation work, but also replica silk damask coverlet, curtains and valances to preserve the fragile originals. Brought back to its former glory, it turns heads in the Met’s renovated British Galleries — thanks, in part, to Country Life.

This article originally appeared in the September 1 issue of Country Life. For more information on how to subscribe, click here.