Louis XV furniture
Louis XV furniture was designed not for the vast palace state rooms of the Versailles of Louis XIV, but for the smaller, more intimate salons created by Louis XV and by his mistresses, Madame de Pompadour and Madame DuBarry. It included several new types of furniture, including the commode and the chiffonier, and many pieces, particularly chairs and tables, were designed to be moved easily rearranged or moved from room to room, depending upon the kind of function.
With the death of Louis XIV on 1 September 1715, his grandson, Louis XV, born in 1710, became King. Because of his young age, France was ruled by a Regent, Philippe of Orleans, until 1723. During this period, the style of furniture changed little from the Louis XIV period; it was massive, lavishly decorated and solemn, designed for the gigantic state halls of the new Palace of Versailles. In 1722 Louis XV moved from Paris, where he had lived with the Regent, to Versailles, began his own rule, and gradually imposed his own taste on the arts, architecture, and furniture.
Alexis Simon Belle
During the years 1716 to 1719, Belle received many commissions from Jacobites in exile after the unsuccessful rising of 1715. By then, the Old Pretender was himself living in Italy.
During the 1720s, Belle's work was increasingly for the French nobility. He painted the young King Louis XV, and much of his work was engraved, showing that he had by then a high status in France. He painted Louis XV's one-time fiancée Mariana Victoria of Spain, whom he later did not marry; he worked also for Jacobites in France, and as late as 1724 signed a portrait of Marie-Charlotte Sobieska (James Edward Stuart's sister-in-law) "pictor regis Britann" (painter to the king of Britain). In 1731, Belle made two copies of portraits by David of James Edward Stuart's two young sons, Prince Charles Edward Stuart and Prince Henry Benedict Stuart.