Marc-Etienne Janety (1739-1820) was the Royal Goldsmith to

King Louis XVI Louis XVI (''Louis-Auguste''; ; 23 August 175421 January 1793) was the last King of France before the fall of the monarchy during the French Revolution. He was referred to as ''Citizen Louis Capet'' during the four months just before he was e ...

until 1792, when the King was dethroned. A few of Janety's pieces worked in

platinum Platinum is a chemical element with the symbol Pt and atomic number 78. It is a dense, malleable, ductile, highly unreactive, precious, silverish-white transition metal. Its name originates from Spanish , a diminutive of "silver". Pla ...

(a novel metal in the late 1700s) survive. One is a platinum and glass sugar bowl (1786) at the

Metropolitan Museum of Art The Metropolitan Museum of Art of New York City, colloquially "the Met", is the largest art museum in the Americas. Its permanent collection contains over two million works, divided among 17 curatorial departments. The main building at 1000 ...

in New York. The others are four kilograms Janety made in 1796–1799. One of them was declared the

Kilogramme des Archives The grave, abbreviated ''gv'', is the unit of mass used in the first metric system which was implemented in France in 1793. In 1795, the grave was renamed as the kilogram. Origin The modern kilogram has its origins in the Age of Enlightenment an ...

(Kilogram of the French Archives) and became the legal kilogram standard for France in 1799, until superseded in 1889 by a platinum-iridium kilogram made by the Johnson-Matthey company.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Janety, Marc-Etienne French goldsmiths 1739 births 1820 deaths