Monkey Riding a Goat Sculpture from Versailles in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, May 2018

Monkey Riding a Goat,1672–74

Artist: Pierre Le Gros the Elder (French, 1629–1714)

Artist: Benoît Massou (French, Richelieu, Indre-et-Loire 1627–1684 Paris)

Date: 1672–74

Culture: French

Medium: Painted lead

Dimensions: 39 3/8 × 46 7/16 × 15 3/4 in., 2204.6 lb. (100 × 118 × 40 cm, 1000 kg)

Classification: Sculpture

Credit Line: Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon (MV 7926)


The monkey riding a goat represents Aesop’s fable of "The War between the Birds and the Beasts." Some twenty sculptors worked on the thirty-nine fountains for the Labyrinth between 1672 and 1674. With more than three hundred lead figures, it stood as the largest ensemble of animal sculptures until the work of the nineteenth-century artist Antoine-Louis Barye.


Text from: www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/699661