THE
TAPESTRY
BOOK

BY

HELEN CHURCHILL CANDEE

Author of “Decorative Styles and Periods”

WITH FOUR PLATES IN COLOUR AND NINETY-NINE
ILLUSTRATIONS IN BLACK-AND-WHITE

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
MCMXII

See larger image

HERSE AND MERCURY

Renaissance Brussels Tapestry, Italian Cartoon. W. de Pannemaker, weaver.
Collection of George Blumenthal, Esq., New York

Copyright, 1912, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company

———

All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign
languages, including the Scandinavian

TO
TWO CERTAIN BYZANTINE MADONNAS
AND THEIR OWNERS

AN ACKNOWLEDGMENT

Modesty so dominates the staff in art museums that I
am requested not to make mention of those officers who
have helped me with friendly courtesy and efficiency. To
the officers and assistants at the Metropolitan Museum
of Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Print Department
in the Library of Congress in Washington, indebtedness
is here publicly acknowledged with the regret that
I may not speak of individuals. Photographs of tapestries
are credited to Messrs. A. Giraudon, Paris; J. Laurent,
Madrid; Alinari, Florence; Wm. Baumgarten, and Albert
Herter, New York, and to those private collectors whose
names are mentioned on the plates.

H. C. C.

[Pg ix]

CONTENTS

[Pg xi]

ILLUSTRATIONS

[Pg 1]

THE TAPESTRY BOOK

CHAPTER I

A FOREWORD

THE commercial fact that tapestries have immeasurably
increased in value within the last five
years, would have little interest were it not that
this increase is the direct result of America’s awakened
appreciation of this form of art. It has come about in
these latter days that tapestries are considered a necessity
in the luxurious and elegant homes which are multiplying
all over our land. And the enormous demand thus
made on the supply, has sent the prices for rare bits into
a dizzy altitude, and has made even the less perfect pieces
seem scarce and desirable.

The opinion of two shrewd men of different types is
interesting as bearing on the subject of tapestries. One
with tastes fully cultivated says impressively, “Buy good
old tapestries whenever you see them, for there are no
more.” The other says bluffly, “Tapestries? You can’t
touch ’em. The prices have gone way out of sight, and
are going higher every day.” The latter knows but one
view, the commercial, yet both are right, and these two
views are at the bottom of the present keen interest in
tapestries in our country. Outside of this, Europe has
collections which we never can equal, and that thought
[Pg 2]
alone is enough to make us snatch eagerly at any opportunity
to secure a piece. We may begin with our ambition
set on museum treasures, but we can come happily
down to the friendly fragments that fit our private purses
and the wall-space by the inglenook.

Tapestries are not to be bought lightly, as one buys a
summer coat, to throw aside at the change of taste or
circumstance. They demand more of the buyer than
mere money; they demand that loving understanding and
intimate appreciation that exists between human friends.
A profound knowledge of tapestries benefits in two ways,
by giving the keenest pleasure, and by providing the collector—or
the purchaser of a single piece—with a self-protection
that is proof against fraud, unconscious or deliberate.

The first step toward buying must be a bit of pleasant
study which shall serve in the nature of self-defence.
Not by books alone, however, shall this subject be approached,
but by happy jaunts to sympathetic museums,
both at home and abroad, by moments snatched from the
touch-and-go talk of afternoon tea in some friend’s salon
or library, or by strolling visits to dealers. These object
lessons supplement the book, as a study of entomology is
enlivened by a chase for butterflies in the flowery meads
of June, or as botany is made endurable by lying on a
bank of violets. All work and no play not only makes
Jack a dull boy, but makes dull reading the book he has
in hand.

The tale of tapestry itself carries us back to the unfathomable
East which has a trick at dates, making the
[Pg 3]
Christian Era a modern epoch, and making of us but a
newly-sprung civilisation in the history of the old grey
world. After showing us that the East pre-empted originality
for all time, the history of tapestry lightly lifts us
over a few centuries and throws us into the romance of
Gothic days, then trails us along through increasing
European civilisation up to the great awakening, the
Renaissance. Then it loiters in the pleasant ways of the
kings of France during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Centuries, and finally falls upon modern effort, not limited
to Europe now, but nesting also in the New World
which is especially our own.

Tapestry, according to the interpretation of the word
used in this book, is a pictured cloth, woven by an artist
or a talented craftsman, in which the design is an integral
part of the fabric, and not an embroidery stitched on a
basic tissue. With this flat statement the review of tapestries
from antiquity until our time may be read without
fear of mistaking the term.

THE LOOM

The looms on which tapestries are made are such as
have been known as long as the history of man is known,
but we have come to call them high-warp and low-warp,
or as the French have it, haute lisse and basse lisse. In
the celebrated periods of weaving the high loom has been
the one in use, and to it is accredited a power almost
mysterious; yet the work of the two styles of loom are not
distinguishable by the weave alone, and it is true that the
low-warp looms were used in France when the manufacture
[Pg 4]
of tapestries was permanently established by the
Crown about 1600. So difficult is it to determine the
work of the two looms that weavers themselves could not
distinguish without the aid of a red thread which they
at one time wove in the border. Yet because the years
of the highest perfection in tapestries have been when the
high loom was in vogue, some peculiar power is supposed
to reside within it. That the high movements of the fine
arts have been contemporary with perfection in tapestries,
seems not to be taken into consideration.

NECESSARY FRENCH TERMS

French terms belong so much to the art of tapestry
weaving that it is hard to find their English equivalent.
Tapestries of verdure and of personnages describe the
two general classes, the former being any charming mass
of greenery, from the Gothic millefleurs, and curling
leaves with animals beneath, to the lovely landscapes of
sophisticated park and garden which made Beauvais
famous in the Eighteenth Century. Tapisseries des personnages
have, as the name implies, the human figure as
the prominent part of the design. The shuttle or bobbin
of the high loom is called a broche, and that of the low
loom a flute. Weavers throughout Europe, whether in
the Low Countries or in France, were called tapissiers,
and this term was so liberal as to need explaining.

WORKERS’ FUNCTIONS

The tapestry factory was under the guidance of a
director; under him were the various persons required for
[Pg 5]
the work. Each tapestry woven had a directing artist, as
the design was of primary importance. This man had
the power to select the silks and wools for the work, that
they might suit his eye as to colour. But there was also
a chef d’atelier who was an artist weaver, and he directed
this matter and all others when the artist of the cartoons
was not present. Under him were the tapissiers who
did the actual weaving, and under these, again, were the
apprentices, who began as boys and served three years
before being allowed to try their hands at a “’prentice
job” or essay at finished work.

WEAVERS

The word weaver means so little in these days that it
is necessary to consider what were the conditions exacted
of the weavers of tapestries in the time of tapestry’s highest
perfection. A tapissier was an artist with whom a
loom took place of an easel, and whose brush was a
shuttle, and whose colour-medium was thread instead of
paints. This places him on a higher plane than that of
mere weaver, and makes the term tapissier seem fitter.
Much liberty was given him in copying designs and
choosing colours. In the Middle Ages, when the Gothic
style prevailed, the master-weaver needed often no other
cartoon for his work than his own sketches enlarged from
the miniatures found in the luxurious missals of the day.
These historic books were the luxuries of kings, were
kept with the plate and jewels, so precious were considered
their exquisitely painted scenes in miniature. From
them the master-weaver drew largely for such designs
[Pg 6]
as The Seven Deadly Sins and other “morality” subjects.

Master-weavers were many in the best years of tapestry
weaving; indeed, a man must have attained the dignity
and ability of that position before being able to produce
those marvels of skill which were woven between 1475
and 1575 in Flanders, France and Italy. Their aids, the
apprentices, pique the fancy, as Puck harnessed to labour
might do. They were probably as mischievous, as shirking,
as exasperating as boys have ever known how to be,
but those little unwilling slaves of art in the Middle Ages
make an appeal to the imagination more vivid than that
of the shabby lunch-box boy of to-day.

DYERS

Accessory to the weavers, and almost as important,
were the dyers who prepared the thread for use. The
conscientiousness of their work cries out for recognition
when the threads they dyed are almost unaltered in colour
after five hundred years of exposure to their enemies,
light and air. Dye stuffs were precious in those days,
and so costly that even threads of gold and silver (which
in general were supplied by the client ordering the tapestry)
hardly exceeded in value certain dyed wools and
silk. All of these workers, from director down to apprenticed
lad, were bound by the guild to do or not do,
according to its infinite code, to the end that the art of
tapestry-making be held to the highest standards. The
laws of the guilds make interesting reading. The guild
prevailed all over Europe and regulated all crafts. In
[Pg 7]
Florence even to-day evidences of its power are on every
side, and the Guildhall in London attests its existence
there. Moreover, the greatest artists belonged to the
guilds, uniting themselves usually by work of the goldsmith,
as Benvenuto Cellini so quaintly describes in his
naïve autobiography.

GUILDS

It was these same protective laws of the guilds that
in the end crippled the hand of the weaver. The laws
grew too many to comply with, in justice to talent, and
talent with clipped wings could no longer soar. At the
most brilliant period of tapestry production Flanders was
to the fore. All Europe was appreciating and demanding
the unequalled products of her ateliers. It was but
human to want to keep the excellence, to build a wall of
restrictions around her especial craft that would prevent
rivals, and at the same time to press the ateliers to execute
all the orders that piled in toward the middle of the
Sixteenth Century.

But although the guilds could make wise laws and enforce
them, it could not execute in haste and retain the
standard of excellence. And thus came the gradual decay
of the art in Brussels, a decay which guild-laws had
no power to arrest.

GOTHIC PERIOD

The first period in tapestries which interests—except
the remnants of Egyptian and aboriginal work—is that
of the Middle Ages, the early Gothic, because that is
[Pg 8]
when the art became a considerable one in Europe. It
is a time of romance, of chivalry, of deep religious feeling,
and yet seems like the childhood of modernity. Is
it the fault of crudity in pictorial art, or the fault of
romances that we look upon those distant people as more
elemental than we, and thus feel for them the indulgent
compassion that a child excites? However it is, theirs
is to us a simple time of primitive emotion and romance,
and the tapestries they have left us encourage the whim.

The time of Gothic perfection in tapestry-making is
included in the few years lying between 1475 and 1520.
Life was at that time getting less difficult, and art had
time to develop. It was no longer left to monks and
lonely ladies, in convent and castle, but was the serious
consideration of royalty and nobility. No need to dwell
on the story of modern art, except as it affects the art of
tapestry weaving. With the improvement of drawing
that came in these years, a greater excellence of weave
was required to translate properly the meaning of the
artist. The human face which had hitherto been either
blank or distorted in expression, now required a treatment
that should convey its subtlest shades of expression.
Gifted weavers rose to the task, became almost inspired
in the use of their medium, and produced such works of
their art as have never been equalled in any age. These
are the tapestries that grip the heart, that cause a frisson
of joy to the beholder. And these are the tapestries we
buy, if kind chance allows. If they cannot be ours to
live with, then away to the museum in all haste and often,
to feast upon their beauties.

[Pg 9]

RENAISSANCE

That great usurper, the Renaissance, came creeping up
to the North where the tapestry looms were weaving
fairy webs. Pope Pius X wanted tapestries, those of the
marvellous Flemish weave. But he wanted those of
the new style of drawing, not the sweet restraint and
finished refinement of the Gothic. Raphael’s cartoons
were sent to Brussels’ workshops, and thus was the North
inoculated with the Renaissance, and thus began the
second phase of the supreme excellency of Flemish tapestries.
It was the Renaissance expressing itself in the
wondrous textile art. The weavers were already perfect
in their work, no change of drawing could perplex them.
But to their deftness with their medium was now added
the rich invention of the Italian artists of the Renaissance,
at the period of perfection when restraint and delicacy
were still dominant notes.

It was the overworking of the craft that led to its
decadence. Toward the end of the Sixteenth Century
the extraordinary period of Brussels perfection had
passed.

But tapestry played too important a part in the life
and luxury of those far-away centuries for its production
to be allowed to languish. The magnificence of every
great man, whether pope, king or dilettante, was ill-expressed
before his fellows if he were not constantly
surrounded by the storied cloths that were the indispensable
accessories of wealth and glory. Palaces and
castles were hung with them, the tents of military
[Pg 10]
encampments were made gorgeous with their richness, and
no joust nor city procession was conceivable without their
colours flaunting in the sun as background to plumed
knights and fair ladies. Venice looked to them to
brighten her historic stones on days of carnival, and Paris
spread them to welcome kings.

FRANCE

When, therefore, Brussels no longer supplied the tissues
of her former excellence, opportunity came for some
other centre to rise. The next important producer was
Paris, and in Paris the art has consistently stayed. Other
brief periods of perfection have been attained elsewhere,
but Paris once establishing the art, has never let it drop,
not even in our own day—but that is not to be considered
at this moment.

Divers reigns of divers kings, notably that of Henri
IV, fostered the weaving of tapestry and brought it to
an interesting stage of development, after which Louis
XIV established the Gobelins. From that time on for a
hundred years France was without a rival, for the decadent
work of Brussels could not be counted as such.
Although the work of Italy in the Seventeenth Century
has its admirers, it is guilty of the faults of all of Italy’s
art during the dominance of Bernini’s ideals.

AMERICAN INTEREST

America is too late on the field to enter the game of
antiquity. We have no history of this wonderful textile
art to tell. But ours is the power to acquire the lovely
[Pg 11]
examples of the marvellous historied hangings of other
times and of those nations which were our forebears before
the New World was discovered. And we are
acquiring them from every corner of Europe where they
may have been hiding in old château or forgotten chest.
To the museums go the most marvellous examples given
or lent by those altruistic collectors who wish to share
their treasures with a hungry public. But to the mellow
atmosphere of private homes come the greater part of
the tapestries. To buy them wisely, a smattering of their
history is a requisite. Within the brief compass of this
book is to be found the points important for the amateur,
but for a profounder study he must turn to those huge
volumes in French which omit no details.

Not entirely by books can he learn. Association with
the objects loved, counts infinitely more in coming to an
understanding. Happy he who can make of tapestries
the raison d’être for a few months’ loitering in Europe,
and can ravish the eye and intoxicate the imagination
with the storied cloths found hanging in England, in
France, in Spain, in Italy, in Sweden, and learn from
them the fascinating tales of other men’s lives in other
men’s times.

Then, when the tour is finished and a modest tapestry
is hung at home, it represents to its instructed owner the
concentrated tale of all he has seen and learned. In
the weave he sees the ancient craftsman sitting at his
loom. In the pattern is the drawing of the artist of
the day, in the colours, the dyes most rare and costly;
in the metal, the gold and silver of a duke or prince; and
[Pg 12]
in the tale told by the figures he reads a romance of chivalry
or history, which has the glamour given by the haze
of distant time to human action.

To enter a house where tapestries abound, is to feel
oneself welcomed even before the host appears. The
bending verdure invites, the animated figures welcome,
and at once the atmosphere of elegance and cordiality
envelopes the happy visitor.

To live in a house abundantly hung with old tapestries,
to live there day by day, makes of labour a pleasure
and of leisure a delight. It is no small satisfaction in
our work-a-day life to live amidst beauty, to be sure that
every time the eyes are raised from the labour of writing
or sewing—or of bridge whist, if you like—they encounter
something worthy and lovely. In the big living-room
of the home, when the hours come in which the
family gathers, on a rainy morning, or on any afternoon
when the shadows grow grim outside and the afternoon
tea-tray is brought in whispering its discreet tune
of friendly communion, the tapestries on the walls seem
to gather closer, to enfold in loving embrace the sheltered
group, to promise protection and to augment brotherly
love.

In the dining-room the glorious company assembles, so
that he who eats therein, attends a feast on Olympus, even
though the dyspeptic’s fast be his lot. If the eyes gaze
on Coypel’s gracious ladies, under fruit and roses, with
adolescent gods adoring, what matters if the palate is
chastised? In a dining-room soft-hung with piquant
[Pg 13]
scenes, even buttermilk and dog-biscuit, burnt canvasback
and cold Burgundy lose half their bitterness.

When night is well started in its flight, perhaps one
only, one lover of the silence and the solitude, loath to
give away to soft sleep the quiet hours, this one remains
behind when all the others have flown bedward, and to
him the neighbouring tapestries speak a various language.
From the easy chair he sees the firelight play on the
verdure with the effect of a summer breeze, the gracious
foliage all astir. The figures in this enchanted wood are
set in motion and imagination brings them into the life
of the moment, makes of them sympathetic playmates
coaxing one to love, as they do, the land of romance.
Before their imperturbable jocundity what bad humour
can exist? All the old songs of mock pastoral times come
singing in the ears, “It happened on a day, in the merry
month of May,” “Shepherds all and maidens fair,” “It
was a lover and his lass,” “Phœbus arise, and paint the
skies,” et cetera. Animated by the fire, in the silence of
the winter night the loving horde gathers and ministers to
the mind afflicted with much hard practicality and the
strain of keeping up with modern inexorable times.
This sweet procession on the walls, thanks be to lovely
art, needs no keeping up with, merely asks to scatter joy
and to soften the asperities of a too arduous day.

All the way up the staircase in the house of tapestries
are dainty bits of millefleurs, that Gothic invention for
transferring a block of the spring woods from under the
trees into a man-made edifice. It may have a deep indigo
[Pg 14]
background or a dull red—like the shades of moss or like
last year’s fallen leaves—but over it all is abundantly
sprinkled dainty bluebells, anemones, daisies, all the
spring beauties in joyous self-assertion and happy mingling.
With such flowery guides to mark the way the
path to slumberland is followed. Once within the bedroom,
the poppies of the hangings spread drowsy influence,
and the happy sleeper passes into unconsciousness,
passes through the flowered border of the ancient square,
into the scene beyond, becomes one of those storied persons
in the enchanted land and lives with them in jousts
and tourneys or in fêtes champêtres at lovely châteaux.
The magic spell of the house of tapestries has fallen like
the dew from heaven to bless the striver in our modern
life of exigency and fatigue.

See larger image

CHINESE TAPESTRY

Chien Lung Period

See larger image

COPTIC TAPESTRY

About 300 A. D.

[Pg 15]

CHAPTER II

ANTIQUITY

EGYPT and China, India and Persia, seem made to
take the conceit from upstart nations like those of
Europe and our own toddling America. Directly
we scratch the surface and look for the beginning
of applied arts, the lead takes us inevitably to the oldest
civilisation. It would seem that in a study of fabrics
which are made in modern Europe, it were enough to
find their roots in the mediæval shades of the dark ages;
but no, back we must go to the beginning of history
where man leaped from the ambling dinosaur, which
then modestly became extinct, and looking upon the lands
of the Nile and the Yangtsi-kiang found them good, and
proceeded to pre-empt all the ground of applied arts, so
that from that time forward all the nations of the earth
were and are obliged to acknowledge that there is nothing
new under the sun.

In the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is a
bit of tapestry, Coptic, that period where Greek and
Egyptian drawing were intermixed, a woman’s head
adorned with much vanity of head-dress, woven two or
three centuries after Christ. (Plate facing page 15.)
In the Boston Museum of Fine Arts are other rare specimens
of this same time. (Plates facing pages 16
and 17.)
Looking further back, an ancient decoration shows Penelope
[Pg 16]
at her high loom, four hundred years before the
Christian era; and one, still older, shows the Egyptians
weaving similarly three thousand years before that epoch.

It is not altogether thrilling to read that civilised people
of ancient times wove fabrics for dress and decoration,
but it certainly is interesting to learn that they were
masters of an art which we carelessly attribute to Europe
of six centuries back, and to find that the weaving apparatus
and the mode of work were almost identical. The
Coptic tapestry of the Third Century is woven in the
same manner as the tapestries that come to us from Europe
as the flower of comparatively recent times, and its
dyes and treatment of shading are identical with the
Gothic times. Penelope’s loom as pictured on an ancient
vase, is the same in principle as the modern high-warp
loom, although lacking a bit in convenience to the
weaver; and so we can easily imagine the lovely lady at
work on her famous web, “playing for time,” during
Ulysses’ absence, when she sat up o’ nights undoing her
lovely stint of the day.

And the Egyptian loom shown in ancient pictures—that
is even more modern than Penelope’s, although it
was set up three thousand years before, a last guide-post
on the backward way to the misty land called prehistoric.

But as there is really little interest except for the
archeologist in digging so far into the past for an art
that has left us but traditions and museum fragments, let
us skim but lightly the surface of this time, only picking
up the glistening facts that attract the mind’s eye, so that
[Pg 17]
we may quickly reach the enchanted land of more recent
times which yet appear antique to the modern.

See larger image

COPTIC TAPESTRY

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

See larger image

COPTIC TAPESTRY

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

There are those to whom reading the Bible was a
forced task during childhood, a class which slipped the
labour as soon as years gave liberty of choice. There
are others who have always turned as naturally to its
accounts of grand ceremony and terrible battles as to the
accounts of Cæsar, Cœur de Lion, Charlemagne. But
in either case, whatever the reason for the eye to absorb
these pages of ancient Hebrew history, the impression is
gained of superb pomp. And always concerned with
it are descriptions of details, lovingly impressed, as
though the chronicler was sure of the interest of his audience.
In this enumeration, decorative textiles always
played a part. Such textiles as they were exceed in extravagance
of material any that we know of European
production, for in many cases they were woven entirely of
gold and silver, and even set with jewels. These gorgeous
fabrics shone like suns on the magnificent pomp of
priest and ruler, and declared the wealth and power of
the nation. They departed from the original intention
of protecting shivering humanity from chill draughts or
from close and cold association with the stones of architectural
construction, and became a luxury of the eye, a
source of bewilderment to the fancy and a lively intoxication
to those who—irrespective of class, or of century—love
to compute display in coin.

But, dipping into the history of one ancient country
after another, it is easy to see that the usual fabric for
hanging was woven of wool, of cotton and of silk, and
[Pg 18]
carried the design in the weaving. Babylon the great,
Egypt under the Pharaohs, Greece in its heroic times,
Rome under the Emperors—not omitting China and
India of the Far East—these countries of ancient peoples
all knew the arts of dyeing and weaving, of using the
materials that we employ, and of introducing figures
symbolic, geometric, or realistic into the weaving. Beyond
a doubt the high loom has been known to man since
prehistoric times. It may be discouraging to those who
like to feel that tapestry properly belongs to Europe only,—Europe
of the last six centuries—to find that the art
has been sifted down through the ages; but in reality it is
but one more link between us and the centuries past, the
human touch that revivifies history, that unites humanity.
People of the past wear a haze about them, are immovable
and rigid as their pictured representations. The Assyrian
is to us a huge man of impossible beard, the
Egyptian is a lean angle fixed in posture, the Greek is
eternally posed for the sculptor.

But once we can find that these people were not forever
transfixed to frieze, but were as simple, as industrious,
as human as we, the kinship is established, and
through their veins begins to flow the stream that is common
to all humanity. These people felt the same need
for elegantly covering the walls of their homes that we
in this country of new homes feel, and the craftsmen led
much the same lives as do craftsmen of to-day. Even in
the matter of expense, of money which purchasers were
willing to spend for woven decorative fabrics, we see no
novelty in the high prices of to-day, the Twentieth
[Pg 19]
Century. The Mantle of Alcisthenes is celebrated for having
been bought by the Carthaginians for the equal of a
hundred thousand dollars.

See larger image

TAPESTRY FOUND IN GRAVES IN PERU

Date prior to Sixteenth Century

Thus we connect ourselves with the remote past in
making a continuous history. But as the purpose of this
book is to assist the owner of tapestries to understand the
story of his hangings and to enable the purchaser or collector
to identify tapestries on his own knowledge instead
of through the prejudiced statements of the salesman, it
is useless to dwell long upon the fabrics that we can only
see through exercise of the imagination or in disintegrated
fragments in museums.

Then away with Circe and her leisure hours of weaving,
with Helen and her heroic canvas, and the army of
grandiose Biblical folk, and let us come westward into
Europe in short review of the textiles called tapestry
which were produced from the early Christian centuries
to the time of the Crusades, and thus will we approach
more modern times.

So far as known, high-warp weaving was not universally
used in Europe in the first part of the Middle Ages.
Whether plain or figured, most of the fabrics of that
time that have come down to us for hangings or for clothing,
are woven, with the decorative pattern executed by
the needle on woven cloth. In Persia and neighbouring
states, however, the high-warp loom was used.[1]

Europe in the Middle Ages was a place so savage, so
devastated by war and by neighbouring malice, that to
consider it is to hear the clash of steel, to feel the pangs
[Pg 20]
of hunger, to experience the fearsome chill of dungeons
or moated castles. It was a time when those who could
huddle in fortresses mayhap died natural deaths, but
those who lived in the world were killed as a matter of
course. Man was man’s enemy and to be killed on sight.

In such gay times of carnage, art is dead. Men there
were who drew designs and executed them, for the luxe
of the eye is ever demanding, but the designs were timid
and stunted and came far from the field of art. Fabrics
were made and worn, no doubt, but when looms were
like to be destroyed and the weavers with them, scant attention
was given to refinements.

By the time the Tenth Century was reached matters
had improved. We come into the light of records. It
is positively known that the town of Saumur, down in
the lovely country below Tours, became the destination
of a quantity of wall-hangings, carpets, curtains, and seat
covers woven of wool. This was by order of the third
Abbot Robert of the Monastery of St. Florent, one of
those vigorous, progressive men whose initiative inspires
a host. It is recorded that he also ordered two pieces of
tapestry executed, not of wool exclusively, but with silk
introduced, and in these the figures of the designs were
the beasts that were then favourites in decoration and that
still showed the influence of Oriental drawing.

Before enumerating other authentic examples of early
tapestries it is well to speak of the reason for their being
invariably associated with the church. The impression
left by history is that folk of those days must have been
universally religious when not cutting each other in bits
[Pg 21]
with bloody cutlass. The reason is, of course, that when
poor crushed humanity began to revive from the devastating
onslaughts of fierce Northern barbarians, it was
with a timid huddling in monasteries, for there was
found immunity from attack. The lord of the castle was
forced to go to war or to resist attack in his castle, but
the monastery was exempt from whatever conscription
the times imposed, and frocked friars were always on
hand were defence needed. Thus it came about that
monasteries became treasure-houses, the only safe ones,
were built strong, were sufficiently manned, and therefore
were the safe-deposit of whatever articles of concentrated
value the great lord of the Middle Ages might
accumulate. Many tapestries thus deposited became
gifts to the institution which gave them asylum.

The arts and crafts of the Middle Ages were in the
hands of the monasteries, monks and friars being the
only persons with safety and leisure. Weaving fell naturally
to them to execute as an art. In the castles, necessary
weaving for the family was done by the women, as
on every great lord’s domains were artisans for all crafts;
and great ladies emulated Penelope and Helen of old in
passing their hours of patience and anxiety with fabricating
gorgeous cloths. But these are exceptional, and
deal with such grand ladies as Queen Matilda, who with
her maidens embroidered (not wove) the Bayeux Tapestry,
and with the Duchess Gonnor, wife of Richard First,
who embroidered for the church of Notre Dame at
Rouen a history of the Virgin and Saints.[2]

[Pg 22]
To the monasteries must be given the honour of preserving
this as many other arts, and of stimulating the
laity which had wealth and power to present to religious
institutions the best products of the day. The subjects
executed inside the monastery were perforce religious,
many revelling in the horrors of martyrology, and those
intended as gifts or those ordered by the clergy were
religious in subject for the sake of appropriateness. It
is interesting to note the sweet childlike attitude of all
lower Europe toward the church in these years, a sort of
infantile way of leaving everything in its hands, all
knowledge, all wisdom, all power. It was not even
necessary to read or write, as the clergy conveniently concerned
themselves with literacy. As late as the beginning
of the Fifteenth Century Philip the Hardy, the
great Duke of Burgundy, in ordering a tapestry, signed
the order, not with his autograph, for he could not, but
with his mark, for he, too, left pen-work to the clerks of
the church.

That pile of concentrated royal history, the old abbey
of St. Denis, received, late in the Tenth Century, one of
the evidences of royal patronage that every abbey must
have envied. It was a woven representation of the
world, as scientists of that day imagined our half-discovered
planet, and was presented by Queen Adelaide,
the wife of Hugh Capet, whose descendants reigned for
three hundred years.[3]

While dealing with records rather than with objects
on which the eye can gaze and the hand can rest, note
[Pg 23]
must be made of an order of a Count of Poitou, William
V, to a factory for tapestries then existing in Poitiers,
showing that the art of weaving had in that spot jumped
the monastery walls in 1025.[4] The order was for a large
hanging with subjects taken from the Scriptures, but
given the then modern touch by introducing portraits of
kings and emperors and their favourite animals transfixed
in ways peculiar to the nature of the day.

A century later, another Abbot of St. Florent in
Saumur had hangings made important enough to be recorded.
One of these represented the four and twenty
elders of the Apocalypse with musical instruments, and
other subjects taken from the Revelation of John. This
subject was one of unending interest to the artists of that
time who seemed to find in its depicting a serving of both
God and imagination.

Among the few tapestries of this period, those of the
Cathedral at Halberstadt must be mentioned, partly by
way of conscientious chronicling, partly that the interested
traveller may, as he travels, know where to find the
rare specimens of the hobby he is pursuing. This is a
high-warp tapestry which authorities variously place as
the product of the Eleventh or the Twelfth Centuries.
Entirely regardless of its age, it has for us the charm of the
craft of hands long vanished, and of primitive art in all
its simplicity of artifice. The subject is religious—could
hardly have been otherwise in those monastic days—and
for church decoration, and to fit the space they were
woven to occupy, each of the two parts was but three
[Pg 24]
and a half feet high although more than fourteen yards
long.

Each important event recorded in history has its expression
in the material product of its time, and this is one
of the charms of studying the liberal arts. Tapestry more
than almost any other handicraft has left us a pictured
history of events in a time when records were scarce.
The effect of the Crusades was noticeable in the impetus
it gave to tapestry, not only by bringing Europe into fresh
contact with Oriental design but by increasing the desire
for luxurious stuffs. The returning crusaders—what
traveller’s tales did they not tell of the fabrics of the
great Oriental sovereigns and their subjects, the soft rugs,
the tent coverings, the gorgeous raiment; and these tales
they illustrated with what fragments they could port in
their travellers’ packs. Here lay inspiration for a continent.

[Pg 25]

CHAPTER III

MODERN AWAKENING

IN the Fourteenth Century, tapestry, the high-warp
product, began to play an important part in the refinements
of the day. We have seen the tendency of the
past time to embellish and soften churches and monastic
institutions with hangings. Records mostly in clerical
Latin, speak of these as curtains for doorways, dossers
for covering seats, and the backs of benches, and baldachins,
as well as carpets for use on the floor. Subjects
were ecclesiastic, as the favourite Apocalypse; or classic,
like that of the Quedlimburg hanging which fantastically
represents the marriage of Mercury and Philology.

But in the Thirteenth Century the political situation
had improved and men no longer slept in armour and
women no longer were prepared to thrust all household
valuables into a coffer on notice that the enemy was
approaching over the plains or up the rocks. Therefore,
homes began to be a little less rude in their comforts.
Stone walls were very much the rule inside as well as
out, but it became convenient then to cover their grim
asperities with the woven draperies, the remains of which
so interest us to-day, and which we in our accession of
luxuriousness would add to the already gently finished
apartments. To put ourselves back into one of those
[Pg 26]
castle homes we are to imagine a room of stone walls,
fitted with big iron hooks, on which hung pictured
tapestry which reached all around, even covering the
doors in its completeness. To admit of passing in and
out the door a slit was made, or two tapestries joined at
this spot. Set Gothic furniture scantily about such a
room, a coffer or two, some high-backed chairs, a generous
table, and there is a room which the art of to-day
with its multiple ingenuity cannot surpass for beauty and
repose.

But such a room gave opportunity for other matters
in the Thirteenth Century. Customs were less polite and
morals more primitive. Important people desiring important
information were given to the spying and eavesdropping
which now has passed out of polite fashion.
And those ancient rooms favoured the intriguer, for the
hangings were suspended a foot or two away from the
wall, and a man or a woman, for that matter, might easily
slip behind and witness conversations to which the listener
had not been invited. So it was customary on occasions
of intimate and secret converse lightly to thrust a
sharpened blade behind the curtains. If, as in the case
in “Hamlet,” the sword pierced a human quarry, so much
the worse for the listener who thus gained death and lost
its dignity.

Before leaving this ancient chamber it is well to impress
ourselves with the interesting fact that tapestries
were originally meant to be suspended loosely, liberally,
from the upper edge only, and to fall in folds or gentle
undulations, thus gaining in decorative value and
[Pg 27]
elegance. This practice had an important effect on the
design, and also gave an appearance of movement to
human figures and to foliage, as each swayed in light
folds.

When considering tapestries of the Thirteenth Century
we are only contemplating the stones of history, for the
actual products of the looms of that time are not for us;
they are all gathered into museums, public or ecclesiastic.
The same might be said of tapestries of the Fourteenth
Century, and almost of the Fifteenth. But those old times
are so full of romance, that their history is worth our
toying with. It adds infinite joy to the possessing of old
tapestries, and converts museum visits into a keen chase
for the elusive but fascinating figures of the past.

Let us then absorb willingly one or two dry facts.
High-warp tapestry we have traced lightly from Egypt
through Greece and Rome and, almost losing the thread
in the Middle Ages, have seen it rising a virile industry,
nursed in monasteries. It was when the stirrings of
artistic life were commencing under the Van Eycks in
the North and under Giotto and the Tuscans in the South
that the weaving of tapestries reached a high standard
of production and from that time until the Nineteenth
Century has been an important artistic craft. The Thirteenth
Century saw it started, the Fourteenth saw the
beginnings of important factories, and the Fifteenth
bloomed into full productions and beauty of the style we
call Gothic.

In these early times of the close of the Thirteenth Century
and the beginning of the Fourteenth, the best known
[Pg 28]
high-warp factories were centred in northern and midland
provinces of France and Flanders, Paris and Arras
being the towns most famed for their productions. As
these were able to supply the rest of Europe, the skilled
technique was lost otherwheres, so that later, when Italy,
Germany and England wished to catch up again their
ancient work, they were obliged to ask instruction of the
Franco-Flemish high-warp workers.[5]

It is not possible in the light of history for either Paris
or Arras to claim the invention of so nearly a prehistoric
art as that of high-warp tapestry, and there is much discussion
as to which of these cities should be given the
honour of superiority and priority in the work of the
Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.

Factories existed at both places and each had its rules
of manufacture which regulated the workman and stimulated
its excellence. The factories at Paris, however,
were more given to producing copies of carpets brought
from the East by returning crusaders, and these were
intended for floors. The craftsmen were sometimes
alluded to as tapissiers Sarrazinois, named, as is easily
seen, after the Saracens who played so large a part in
the adventurous voyages of the day. But in Paris in
1302, by instigation of the Provost Pierre le Jumeau,
there were associated with these tapissiers or workmen,
ten others, for the purpose of making high-warp tapestry,
and these were bound with all sorts of oaths not to depart
from the strict manner of proceeding in this valued handicraft.

[Pg 29]
Indeed, the Articles of Faith, nor the Vows of the
Rosicrucians, could not be more inviolable than the
promises demanded of the early tapestry workers. In
some cases—notably a factory of Brussels, Brabant, in
the Sixteenth Century—there were frightful penalties
attendant upon the breaking of these vows, like the loss
of an ear or even of a hand.

The records of the undertaking of the Provost Pierre
le Jumeau in introducing the high-warp (haute lisse)
workers into the factory where Sarrazinois and other
fabrics were produced, means only that the improvement
had begun, but not that Paris had never before practised
an art so ancient.

The name of Nicolas Bataille is one of the earliest
which we can surround with those props of records that
please the searcher for exact detail.[6] He was both manufacturer
and merchant and was a man of Paris in the
reign of Charles VI, a king who patronised him so well
that the workshops of Paris benefited largely. The
king’s brother becoming envious, tried to equal him in
personal magnificence and gave orders almost as large
as those of the king. Philip the Hardy, uncle of the
king, also employed this designer whose importance has
not lessened in the descent of the centuries.

What makes Bataille of special interest to us is that
we cannot only read of him in fascinating chronicles as
well as dry histories, but we can ourselves see his wondrous
works. In the cathedral at Angers hangs a tapestry
[Pg 30]
executed by him; it is a part of the Apocalypse (favourite
subject) drawn by Dourdin, who was artist of the cartoons
as well as artist to Charles V.

In those days the weaver occupied much the same place
in relation to the cartoonist as the etcher does now to the
painter. That is to say, that because the drawing was
his inspiration, the weaver was none the less an artist
of originality and talent.

These celebrated hangings at Angers, although commenced
in 1376 for Louis of Anjou, were not completed
in all the series until 1490, therefore Bataille’s work was
on the first ones, finished on Christmas, 1379. The design
includes imposing figures, each seated on a Gothic
throne reading and meditating. The larger scenes are
topped with charming figures of angels in primitive skies
of the “twisted ribbon” style of cloud, angels whose duty
and whose joy is to trump eternally and float in defiance
of natural laws of gravitation.

The museum at the Gobelins factory in Paris shows
to wondering eyes the other authentic example of late
Fourteenth Century high-warp tapestry, as woven in the
early Paris workshops. It portrays with a lovely naïve
simplicity The Presentation in the Temple. This with
the pieces of the Apocalypse at Angers are all that are
positively known to have come from the Paris workshops
of the late Fourteenth Century.

History steps in with an event that crushed the industry
in Paris. Just when design and execution were at their
highest excellence, and production was prolific, political
events began to annihilate the trade. The English King,
[Pg 31]
Henry V, crossed the Channel and occupied Paris in
1422. Thus, under the oppression of the invaders, the
art of tapestry was discouraged and fell by the way, not
to rise lustily again in Paris for two hundred years.

[Pg 32]

CHAPTER IV

FIFTEENTH CENTURY IN FRANCE AND FLANDERS

WHETHER Arras began as early as Paris is a
question better left unsettled if only for the
sake of furnishing a subject of happy controversy
between the champions of the two opinions. But
certain it is that with fewer distractions to disturb her
craftsmen, and under the stimulus of certain ducal and
royal patrons, Arras succeeded in advancing the art more
than did her celebrated neighbour. It was Arras, too,
that gave the name to the fabric, a name which appears
in England as arras and in Italy as arazzo, as though there
was no other parent-region for the much-needed and
much-prized stuffs than the busy Flemish town.

Among the early records is found proof that in 1311,
a countess of the province of Artois, of which Arras was
the capital, bought a figured cloth in that city, and two
years later ordered various works in high warp.[7] It is
she who became ruler of the province. To patronise the
busy town of her own domains, Arras, she ordered from
there the hangings that were its specialty. Paris also
shared her patronage. She took as husband Otho, Count
of Burgundy, and set his great family the fashion in the
way of patronising the tapestry looms.

It was in the time of Charles V of France, that the
[Pg 33]
Burgundian duke Philip, called the Hardy, began to
patronise conspicuously the Arras factories. In 1393,
as de Barante delightfully chronicles, the gorgeous equipments
of this duke were more than amazing when he
went to arrange peace with the English at Lelingien.[8]

The town chosen for the pourparlers, wherein assembled
the English dukes, Lancaster and Gloucester and
their attendants, as well as the cortége attending the Duke
of Burgundy, was a poor little village ruined by wars.
The conferences were held by these superb old fighters
and statesmen in an ancient thatched chapel. To make
it presentable and worthy of the nobles, it was covered
with tapestries which entirely hid the ruined walls. The
subject of the superb pieces was a series of battles, which
made the Duke of Lancaster whimsically critical of a subject
ill-chosen for a peace conference, he suggesting that
it were better to have represented “la Passion de notre
Seigneur.”

Not satisfied with having the meeting place a gorgeous
and luxurious temple, this Philip, Duke of Burgundy,
demonstrated his magnificence in his own tent, which
was made of wooden planks entirely covered with “toiles
peintes” (authorities state that tapestries with personages
were thus described), and was in form of a château
flanked with towers. As a means of pleasing the English
dukes and the principal envoys, Philip gave to them
superb gifts of tapestries, the beautiful tapestries of
Flanders such as were made only in the territory of the
duke. It is interesting to note this authentic account
[Pg 34]
of the importation of certain Arras tapestries into England.

Subjects at this time introduced, besides Bible people,
figures of Clovis and of Charlemagne. Two hangings
represented, the one The Seven Cardinal Vices, with their
conspicuous royal exponents in the shape of seven vicious
kings and emperors; the other, The Seven Cardinal Virtues,
with the royalties who had been their notable exponents.
Here is a frank criticism on the lives of kings
which smacks of latter-day democracy. All these tapestries
were enriched with gold of Cyprus, as gold threads
were called.

This same magnificent Philip the Hardy, had other
treaties to make later on, and seeing how much his tapestries
were appreciated, continued to make presents of
them. One time it was the Duke of Brittany who had
to be propitiated, all in the interests of peace, peace being
a quality much sought and but little experienced at this
time in France. Perhaps this especial Burgundian duke
had a bit of self-interest in his desire for amity with the
English, for he was lord of the Comité of Artois (including
Arras) and this was a district which, because of its
heavy commerce with England, might favour that country.
A large part of that commerce was wool for tapestry
weaving, wool which came from the prés salés of
Kent, where to-day are seen the same meadows, salt with
ocean spray and breezes, whereon flocks are grazing now
as of old—but this time more for mutton chops than for
tapestry wools.

See larger image

THE SACRAMENTS

Arras Tapestry, about 1430. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The history of the Dukes of Burgundy, because their
[Pg 35]
patronage was so stimulating to the factories of Flanders,
leads us to recall the horrors of the war with Bajazet, the
terrible Sultan of Turkey, and the way in which this cool
monster bartered human lives for human luxuries. It
was when the flower of France (1396) invaded his country
and was in the power of his hand, that he had the
brave company of nobles pass in review before his royal
couch that he might see them mutilated to the death.
Three or four only he retained alive, then sent one of
these, the Sire de Helly, back to his France with parole
d’honneur to return—to amass, first, as big a ransom as
could be raised; this, if in the Turk’s demanding eyes
it appeared sufficient, he would accept in exchange for
the remaining unhappy nobles.

Added to the money which de Helly was able to collect,
were superb tapestries of Arras contributed by the
Burgundian duke, Philip the Hardy. It was argued that
of these luxurious hangings, Bajazet had none, for the
looms of his country had not the craft to make tapestries
of personages. Cloth of gold and of silver, considered
an extreme elegance in France, they argued was no rarity
to the terrible Turk, for it was from Damascus in his
part of the world that this precious fabric came most
plentifully. So de Helly took Arras tapestries into
Turkey, a suite representing the history of Alexander the
Great, and the avaricious monarch was persuaded by reason
of this and other ransom to let his prisoners free.[9]

After the death of Philip the Hardy in 1404, his
accumulated luxuries had to be sold to help pay his
[Pg 36]
fabulous debts. To this end his son sold, among other things,
his superb tapestries, and thus they became distributed in
Paris. And yet John without Fear, who succeeded
Philip, continued to stimulate the Arras weavers. In
1409 he ordered five big hangings representing his victories
of Liége, all battle subjects.[10]

Philip the Good was the next head of the Burgundian
house, and he it was who assisted in the sumptuous preparations
for the entry of the king, Louis XI, into Paris.
The king himself could scarcely equal in magnificence
this much-jewelled duke, whose splendour was a matter
of excitement to the populace. People ran to see him
in the streets or to the church, to feast their eyes on his
cortége, his mounted escort of a hundred knights who
were themselves dukes, princes and other nobles.

His house, in the old quarter of Paris, where we are
wont to wander with a Baedeker veiled, was the wonder
of all who were permitted to view its interior. Here he
had brought his magnificent Arras tapestries and among
them the set of the History of Gideon, which he had had
made in honour of the order of the Golden Fleece founded
by him at Bruges, in 1429, for, he said, the tale of Gideon
was more appropriate to the Fleece than the tale of Jason,
who had not kept his trust—a bit of unconventionalism
appreciable even at this distance of time.

Charles le Téméraire—the Bold or rather the foolhardy—how
he used and lost his tapestries is of interest
to us, because his possessions fell into a place where we
can see them by taking a little trouble. Some of them
[Pg 37]
are among the treasures in the museum at Nancy and at
Berne in Switzerland. How they got there is in itself
a matter of history, the history of a war between Burgundy
and Switzerland.

Like all the line of these half-barbaric, picturesque
dukes, Charles could not disassociate himself from magnificence,
which in those days took the place of comfort.
When making war, he endeavoured to have his camp
lodgment as near as possible reproduce the elegance of
his home. In his campaign against Switzerland, his tent
was entirely hung with the most magnificent of tapestries.
After foolhardy onslaughts on a people whose strength
he miscalculated, he lost his battles, his life—and his
tapestries. And this is how certain Burgundian tapestries
hang in the cathedral at Berne, and in the museums
at Nancy.[11]

The simple Swiss mountaineers, accustomed more to
expediency than to luxury, are said to have been entirely
ignorant of the value of their spoils of war. Tapestries
they had never seen, nor had they the experienced eye
to discern their beauties; but cloth, thick woollen cloth,
that would protect shivering man from the cold, was a
commodity most useful; so, many of the fine products of
the high-warp looms that had augmented the pride of
their noble possessor, found their way into shops and were
sold to the Swiss populace in any desired length, according
to bourgeois household needs, a length for a warm
bed-cover, or a square for a table; and thus disappeared
so many that we are thankful for the few whole hangings
[Pg 38]
of that time which are ours to inspect, and which represent
the best work of the day both from Arras and from
Brussels, which was then (about 1476) beginning to produce.

There is a special and local reason why we should be
interested in the products of the high-warp tapestries in
the time of the greatest power of the Dukes of Burgundy.
It is that we can have the happy experience of studying,
in our own country, a set of these hangings, and this without
going farther than to the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, where repose the set called The Sacraments.
(Plates facing pages 34,
38 and 39.) There are
in all seven pieces, although the grounds are well taken
that the set originally included one more. They represent
the four Sacraments of Baptism, Marriage, Confirmation
and Extreme Unction, first by a series of ideal
representations, then by the everyday ceremonies of the
time—the time of Joan of Arc. Thus we have the early
Fifteenth Century folk unveiled to us in their ideals and
in their practicality. The one shows them to be religionists
of a high order, the other reveals a sumptuous and
elegant scale of living belonging to the nobility who made
resplendent those early times.

See larger image

THE SACRAMENTS

Arras Tapestry, about 1430

See larger image

THE SACRAMENTS

Arras Tapestry, about 1430

The drawing is full of simplicity and honesty, the composition
limited to a few individuals, each one having its
place of importance. In this, the early work differed
from the later, which multiplied figures until whole
groups counted no more than individuals. The background
is a field of conventionalised fleur-de-lis of so
large a pattern as not to interfere with the details thrown
[Pg 39]
against it. Scenes are divided by slender Gothic columns,
and other architectural features are tessellated floors
and a sketchy sort of brick-work that appears wherever
a limit-line is needed. It is the charming naïveté of its
drawing that delights. Border there is none, but its lack
is never felt, for the pictures are of such interest that the
eye needs no barrier to keep it from wandering. Whatever
border is found is a varying structure of architecture
and of lettering and of the happy flowers of Gothic times
which thrust their charm into all possible and impossible
places.

The dress, in the suite of ideals, is created by the imagining
of the artist, admixed with the fashion of the day;
but in scenes portraying life of the moment, we are given
an interesting idea of how a bride à la mode was arrayed,
in what manner a gay young lord dressed himself on his
wedding morning, and how a young mother draped her
proud brocade. The colouring is that of ancient stained
glass, simple, rich, the gamut of colours limited, but the
manner of their combining is infinite in its power to
please. The conscientiousness of the ancient dyer lives
after him through the centuries, and the fresh ruby-colour,
the golden yellow of the large-figured brocades,
glow almost as richly now as they did when the Burgundian
dukes were marching up and down the land from
the Mediterranean, east of France, to the coast of
Flanders, carrying with them the woven pictures of their
ideals, their religion and their conquests. The weave is
smooth and even, speaking for the work of the tapissier
or weaver, although time has distorted the faces beyond
[Pg 40]
the lines of absolute beauty; and hatching accomplishes
the shading.

The repairer has been at work on this valuable set, not
the intelligent restorer, but the frank bungler who has
not hesitated to turn certain pieces wrong side out, nor
to set in large sections obviously cut from another tapestry.
It is surmised that the set contained one more piece—it
would be regrettable, indeed, if that missing square
had been cut up for repairs.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York owns
these tapestries through the altruistic generosity of J.
Pierpont Morgan, Esq. They are the most interesting
primitive work which are on public view in our country,
and awake to enthusiasm even the most insensate dullard,
who has a half hour to stand before them and realise all
they mean in art, in morals and in history.

To the lives of the Prophets and Saints we can always
turn; from the romance of men and women we can never
turn away. And so when a Gothic tapestry is found that
frankly omits Biblical folk and gives us a true picture
of men and women of the almost impenetrable time back
of the fifteen hundreds, tells us what they wore, in what
manner they comported themselves, that tapestry has a
sure and peculiar value. The surviving art of the Middle
Ages smacks strong of saints, paints at full length the
people of Moses’ time, but unhappily gives only a bust
of their contemporaries.

See larger image

FIFTEENTH CENTURY FRENCH TAPESTRY

Boston Museum of Fine Arts

See larger image

THE LIFE OF CHRIST

Flemish Tapestry, second half of Fifteenth Century. Boston Museum of Fine Arts

Hangings portraying secular subjects were less often
woven than those of religion and morals, but also the
former have less lustily outlived the centuries, owing to
[Pg 41]
the habit of tearing them from the suspending hooks and
packing them about from château to château, to soften
surroundings for the wandering visitor. Thus it comes
that we have little tapestried record of a time when
knights and ladies and ill-assorted attributes walked hand
in hand, a time of chivalry and cruelty, of roses and war,
of sumptuousness and crudity, of privation and indulgence,
of simplicity and deceit.

If prowling among old books has tempted the hand to
take from the shelves one of those quaint luxuries known
as a “Book of Hours,” there before the eye lies the spirit
of that age in decoration and design. There, too, lies
much of the old spirit of morality—that, whether genuine
or affected, was bound to be expressed. Morality had a
vogue in those days, was a sine qua non of fashion. That
famous amateur Jean, duc de Berry, uncle of Charles VI
of France, had such a book, “Les Très Riches Heures”;
one was possessed by that gifted Milanese lady whom
Ludovico Sforza put out of the line of Lombardy’s throne.
The wonderful Gothic ingenuousness lies in their careful
paintings, the ingenuousness where virtue is expressed by
beauty, and vice by ugliness, and where, with delightful
seriousness, standing figures overtop the houses they
occupy—the same people, the same battlements, we have
seen on the early tapestries. Weavers must surely have
consulted the lovely books of Gothic miniature, so like is
the spirit of the designs to that in the Gothic fabrics.

“The beauties of Agnes Sorel were represented on the
wool,” says Jubinal, “and she herself gave a superb and
magnificent tapestry to the church at Loches,” but this
[Pg 42]
quaint student is doubtful if the lovely amante du roi
actually gave the tapestries that set forth her own beauties,
which beauty all can see in the quiet marble as she
lies sleeping with her spaniel curled up at her lovely feet
in the big château on the Loire.

By means of a rare set bought by the Rogers Fund for
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, we can
see, if not the actual tapestries of fair Agnes Sorel, at least
those of the same epoch and manner. This set is called
The Baillée des Roses and comprises three pieces, fragments
one is inclined to call them, seeing the mutilations
of the ages. (Plate facing page 42.) They were woven
probably before 1450, probably in France, undoubtedly
from French drawings, for the hand and eye of the artist
were evidently under the influence of the celebrated
miniaturist, Jean Fouquet of Tours. Childlike is the
charm of this careful artist of olden times, childlike is his
simplicity, his honesty, his care to retain the fundamental
virtues of a good little boy who lives to the tune of Eternal
Verities.

These three tapestries of the Roses illustrate so well so
many things characteristic of their day, that it is not time
lost to study them with an eye to all their points. There
is the weave, the wool, the introduction of metal threads,
the colour scale; all these besides the design and the story
it tells.

The tapestries represent a custom of France in the time
when Charles VII, the Indolent (and likewise through
Jeanne d’Arc, the victorious) had as his favourite the
fascinating Agnes Sorel. During the late spring, when
[Pg 43]
the roses of France are in fullest flower, various peers of
France had as political duty to present to each member
of the Parliament a rose when the members answered in
response to roll call.

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LA BAILLÉE DES ROSES

French Tapestry, about 1450. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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FIFTEENTH CENTURY MILLEFLEUR WITH ARMS

Cathedral of Troyes

The great chamber where the body met was for the
occasion transformed into a bower; vines and sprays of
roses covered all the grim walls, as the straying vines in
the tapestry reveal. The host of the day, who might be
a foreign prince or cardinal, or one of the “children of
France,” began the day with giving a great breakfast
which took place in the several chambers. During the
feast the noble host paid a courtly visit to each chamber,
accompanied by a servitor who bore a huge salver on
which were the flowers and souvenirs to be presented.
The air was sweet with blossoms and pungent herbs, music
penetrated from the halls outside as the man of conspicuous
elegance played mock humility and served all with
the dainty tribute of a fragrant tender rose. This part
of the ceremony over, the company moved on to the great
audience chamber, where mass was said.

Our tapestries show the figures of ladies and gentlemen
present at this pretty ceremony—too pretty to associate
with desperate Jeanne d’Arc, who at that very time was
rousing France to war to throw off the foreign yoke. The
ladies fair and masters bold are intensely human little
people, for the most part paired off in couples as men
and women have been wont to pair in gardens since
Eden’s time. They are dressed in their best, that is evident,
and by their distant, courteous manners show good
society. The faces of the ladies are childlike, dutiful;
[Pg 44]
those of the men more determined, after the manner of
men.

But the interest of the set centres in the tableau wherein
are but three figures, those of two men and a woman.
Here lies a piquant romance. Who is she, the grand
and gracious lady, bending like a lily stalk among the
roses, with a man on either side? A token is being exchanged
between her and the supplicant at her right.
He, wholly elegant, half afraid, bends the knee and fixes
her with a regard into which his whole soul is thrown.
She, fair lady, is inclining, yet withdrawing, eyes of fear
and modesty cast down. Yet whatever of temerity the
faces tell, the hands are carrying out a comedy. Hid in
the shadow of a copious hat, which the gentleman extends,
lurks a rose; proffered by the lady’s hand is a token—fair
exchange, indeed, of lover’s symbols—provided the strong,
hard man to the left of the lady has himself no right of
command over her and her favours. Thus might one
dream on forever over history’s sweets and romance’s gallantries.

It is across the sea, in the sympathetic Museum of
Cluny that the beauty of early French work is exquisitely
demonstrated. The set of The Lady and the Unicorn is
one of infinite charm. (Plates facing pages 44
and 45.)
In its enchanted wood lives a noble lady tall and fair,
lithe, young and elegant, with attendant maid and two
faithful, fabulous beasts that uphold the standards of
maidenhood. A simple circle denotes the boundary of
the enchanted land wherein she dwells, a park with noble
trees and lovely flowers, among which disport the little
[Pg 45]
animals that associate themselves with mankind. For
four centuries these hangings have delighted the eye of
man, and are perhaps more than ever appreciated now.
Certain it is that the art student’s easel is often set before
them for copying the quaint design and soft colour.

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THE LADY AND THE UNICORN

French Tapestry, Fifteenth Century. Musée de Cluny, Paris

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THE LADY AND THE UNICORN

French Tapestry, Fifteenth Century. Musée de Cluny, Paris

As the early worker in wools could not forget the beauties
of earth, the foreground of many Gothic tapestries
is sprinkled with the loved common flowers of every day,
of the field and wood. This is one of the charming
touches in early tapestry, these little flowers that thrust
themselves with captivating inappropriateness into every
sort of scene. The grave and awesome figures in the
Apocalypse find them at their feet, and in scenes of battle
they adorn the sanguinary sod and twinkle between fierce
combatants.

Occasionally a weaver goes mad about them and refuses
to produce anything else but lily-bells newly sprung
in June, cowslips and daisies pied, rosemary and rue, and
all these in decorous courtesy on a deep, dark background
like twilight on a bank or moonlight in a dell—and lo,
we have the marvellous bit of nature-painting called
millefleurs.

A Burgundian tapestry that has come to this country to
add to our increasing riches, is the large hanging known
as The Sack of Jerusalem. (Plate facing page 46.) Almost
more than any other it revivifies the ancient times of
Philip the Hardy, John without Fear, and Charles the
Bold, when these dukes, who were monarchs in all but
name, were leading lives that make our own Twentieth
Century fretting seem but the unrest of aspens. Such
[Pg 46]
hangings as this, The Sack of Jerusalem, were those that
the great Burgundian dukes had hung about their tents in
battle, their castles in peace, their façades and bridges in
fêtes.

The subject chosen hints religion, but shouts bloodshed
and battle. Those who like to feel the texture of old
tapestries would find this soft and pliable, and in
wondrous state of preservation. Its colours are warm
and fresh, adhering to red-browns and brown-reds and
a general mellow tone differing from the sharp stained-glass
contrasts noticed in The Sacraments. Costumes
show a naïve compromise between those the artist knew
in his own time and those he guessed to appertain to the
year of our Lord 70, when the scene depicted was actually
occurring. The tapestry resembles in many ways the
famous tapestries of the Duke of Devonshire which are
known as the Hardwick Hall tapestries. In drawing it
is similar, in massing, in the placing of spots of interest.
This large hanging is a part of the collection at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.

The Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibits a primitive
hanging which is probably woven in France, Northern
France, at the end of the Fifteenth Century. (Plate
facing page 40.) It represents, in two panels, the power
of the church to drive out demons and to confound the
heathen. Fault can be found with its crudity of drawing
and weave, but tapestries of this epoch can hold a position
of interest in spite of faults.

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THE SACK OF JERUSALEM (DETAIL)

Burgundian Tapestry, about 1450. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

A fine piece at the same museum is the long, narrow
[Pg 47]
hanging representing scenes from the life of Christ, with
a scene from Paradise to start the drama. (Plate facing
page 41.) This tapestry, which is of great beauty, is subdivided
into four panels by slender columns suggesting a
springing arch which the cloth was too low to carry. All
the pretty Gothic signs are here. The simple flowers upspringing,
the Gothic lettering, the panelling, and a narrow
border of such design as suggests rose-windows or
other lace-like carving. Here is noticeable, too, the
sumptuous brocades in figures far too large for the human
form to wear, figures which diminished greatly a very
few decades later.

The Institute of Art, Chicago, possesses an interesting
piece of the period showing another treatment of a similar
subject. (Plate facing page 48.) In this the columns
are omitted, the planes are increased, and there is
an entire absence of the triptych or altar-piece style of
drawing which we associate with the primitive artists in
painting.

We have seen in this slight review that Paris was in a
fair way to cover the castle walls and floors of noble lords
with her high loom and sarrazinois products, when the
English occupation ruined the prosperity of the weaver’s
guild. Arras supplied the enormous demand for tapestries
through Europe, and made a lasting fame. But this
little city, too, had to go down before the hard conditions
of the Conqueror. Louis XI, in 1477, possessed himself
of the town after the death of the last-famed Burgundian
duke, Charles the Bold, and under his eccentric persecutions
[Pg 48]
the guild of weavers scattered. He saw too late his
mistake. But other towns benefited by it, towns whither
the tapissiers fled with their art.

There had also been much trouble between the last
Duke of Burgundy and his Flemish cities. His extravagances
and expeditions led him to make extraordinary
demands upon one town and another for funds, and even
to make war upon them, as at Liége, the battles of which
conflict were perpetuated in tapestries. Let us trust that
no Liégois weaver was forced to the humiliation of weaving
this set.

This disposition to work to his own ultimate undoing
was encouraged in the duke, wherever possible, by the
crafty Louis XI, who had his own reasons for wishing
the downfall of so powerful a neighbour. And thus it
came that Arras, the great tapestry centre, was at first
weakened, then destroyed by the capture of the town by
Louis XI immediately after the tragic death of the duke
in 1477.

Thus everything was favourable to the Brussels factories,
which began to produce those marvels of workmanship
that force from the world the sincerest admiration.
It is frankly asserted that toward the end of the century,
or more accurately, during the reigns of Charles VIII
and Louis XII (1483-1515), tapestry attained a degree
of perfection which has never been surpassed.

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SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF CHRIST, WITH ARMORIAL SHIELDS

Flemish Tapestry, Fifteenth Century. Institute of Art, Chicago

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HISTORY OF THE VIRGIN

Angers Cathedral

We have a very clear idea of what use to make of tapestries
in these days—to hang them in a part of the house
where they will be much seen and much protected, on
an important wall-space where their figures become the
[Pg 49]
friend of daily life, or the bosky shades of their verdure
invite to revery. They are extended flat against the wall,
or even framed, that not one stroke of the artist’s pencil
or one flash of the weaver’s shuttle be hid. But, many
were their uses and grand were their purposes in the days
when high-warp and low-warp weaving was the important
industry of whole provinces. Palaces and castles
were hung with them, but apart from this was the sumptuous
use of a reserve of hangings for outdoor fêtes and
celebrations of all sorts. These were the great opportunities
for all to exhibit their possessions and to make a
street look almost as elegant and habitable as the grandest
chamber of the king.

On the occasion of the entry of a certain queen into
Paris, all the way from Porte St. Denis to the Cathedral
of Notre Dame was hung with such specimens of the
weaver’s art as would make the heart of the modern amateur
throb wildly. They were hung from windows,
draped across the fronts of the houses, and fluttered their
bright colours in the face of an illuminating sun that
yet had no power to fade the conscientious work of the
craftsman. The high lights of silk in the weave, and the
enrichment of gold and silver in the pattern caught and
held the sunbeams. In all the cavalcade of mounted
knights and ladies, there was the flashing of arms, the
gleam of jewelled bridles, the flaunting of rich stuffs,
all with a background of unsurpassed blending of colour
and texture. The bridge over the Seine leading to Notre
Dame, its ramparts were entirely concealed, its asperities
softened, by the tapestries which hung over its sides, making
[Pg 50]
the passage over the river like the approach to a
throne, the luxury of kings combined with the beauty of
the flowing river, the blue sky, the tender green of the
trees.

Indeed, it was so lovely a sight that the king himself
was not content to see it from his honoured but restricted
post, but needs must doff his crown—monarchs wore them
in those fairy days—and fling a leg over a gentleman’s
charger, behind its owner, and thus ride double to see
the sights. So great was his eagerness to enjoy all the
display that he got a smart reproof from an officer of
ceremonies for trespassing.[12]

When Louis XI was the young king, and had not yet
developed the taste for bloodshed and torture that as a
crafty fox he used later to the horror of his nation, he,
too, had similar festivals with similar decorations. On
one occasion the Pont des Changes was made the chief
point in the royal progress through the streets of Paris.
The bridge was hung with superb tapestries of great size,
from end to end, and the king rode to it on a white
charger, his trappings set with turquoise, with a gorgeous
canopy supported over his head. Just as he reached the
bridge the air became full of the music of singing birds,
twenty-five hundred of them at that moment released,
and all fluttering, darting, singing amid the gorgeous
scene to tickle the fancy of a king.

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DAVID AND BATHSHEBA

German Tapestry, about 1450

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FLEMISH TAPESTRY. ABOUT 1500

Collection of Alfred W. Hoyt, Esq.

[Pg 51]

CHAPTER V

HIGH GOTHIC

THE wonderful time of the Burgundian dukes is
gone; Charles le Téméraire leaves the world at
Nancy, where the pitying have set up a cross in
memory of his unkingly death, and where the lover of
things Gothic may wander down a certain way to the
exquisite portico of the Ducal Palace and, entering, find
the Gothic room where the duke’s precious tapestries
are hung. In this sympathetic atmosphere one may
dream away hours in sheer joy of association with these
shadowy hosts of the past, the relentless slayers in the
battle scenes, relentless moralists in the religious subjects—for
morality plays had a parallel in the morality tapestry,
issuing such rigid warnings to those who make merry
as is seen in The Condemnation of Suppers and Banquets,
The Reward of Virtue, The Triumph of Right, The Horrors
of the Seven Deadly Sins, all of which were popular
subjects for the weaver.

With the artists who might be called primitives we
have almost finished in the end of the Fifteenth Century.
The simplicity of the very early weavers passed. They
were content with comparatively few figures, and these
so strongly treated that in composition one scarce took
on more importance than another. When Arras and
other Flemish towns, as well as Paris and certain French
[Pg 52]
towns, developed the industry and employed more ambitious
artists, the designs became more crowded, and the
tendency was to multiply figures in an effort to crowd as
many as possible into the space. When architecture appeared
in the design, towers and battlements were
crowded with peeping heads in delightful lack of proportion,
and forests of spears springing from platoons
of soldiers, filled almost the entire height of the cloth.
The naïve fashion still existed of dressing the characters
of an ancient Biblical or classic drama in costumes which
were the mode of the weaver’s time, disregarding the
epoch in which the characters actually lived.

An adherence to the childlike drawing of the early
workers continues noticeable in their quaint way of putting
many scenes on one tapestry. Interiors are readily
managed, by dividing—as in The Sacraments set in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York—with slender
Gothic columns, than which nothing could be prettier,
especially when framed in at the top with the Gothic
arch. In outdoor scenes the frank disregard of the probable
adds the charm of audacity. Side by side with a
scene of carnage, a field of blood with victims lying prone,
is inserted an island of flowers whereon youths and dogs
are pleasantly sporting; and adjoining that may be another
section cunningly introduced where a martyred
woman is enveloped in flames which spring from the
ground around her as naturally as grass in springtime.

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DAVID AND BATHSHEBA

Flemish Tapestry, late Fifteenth Century

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HISTORY OF ST. STEPHEN

Arras Tapestry, Fifteenth Century

And flowers, flowers everywhere. Those little blossoms
of the Gothic with their perennial beauty, they are
one of the smiles of that far time that shed cheer through
[Pg 53]
the centuries. They are not the grandiose affairs of the
Renaissance whose voluptuous development contains the
arrogant assurance of beauty matured. They do not
crown a column or trail themselves in foliated scrolls;
but are just as Nature meant them to be, unaffected bits
of colour and grace, upspringing from the sod. In the
cathedral at Berne is a happy example of the use of these
sweet flowers, as they appear at the feet of the sacred
group, and as they carry the eye into the sky by means
of the feathery branches like fern-fronds which tops the
scene; but we find them nearer home, in almost every
Gothic tapestry.

It was about the end of the last Crusade when Italy
began to produce the inspired artists who broke the bonds
of Byzantine traditions and turned back to the inspiration
of all art, which is Nature. Giotto, tending his sheep,
began to draw pictures of things as he saw them, Savonarola
awoke the conscience, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio—a
string of names to conjure with—all roused the intellect.
The dawn of the Renaissance flushed Europe with the
life of civilisation. But before the wonderful development
of art through the reversion to classic lines, came
a high perfection of the style called Gothic, and with that
we are pleased to deal first. It is so full of beauty to
the eye and interest to the intellect that sometimes we
must be dragged away from it to regard the softer lines
of later art, with the ingratitude and reluctance of childhood
when torn from its fairy tales to read of real people
in the commonplace of every day.

We are now in the time when the perfection of
[Pg 54]
production was reached in the tapestries we call Gothic.
Artists had grown more certain of their touch in colour
and design, and weavers worked with such conscientious
care as is now almost unknown, and produced a quality
of tapestry superior to that of their forebears. The
Fifteenth Century and the first few years of the Sixteenth
were spent in perfecting the style of the preceding century,
and so great was the perfection reached, that it was
impossible to develop further on those lines.

It must not be supposed from their importance that
Brussels and Bruges were the sole towns of weavers.
There were many high-warp looms, and low-warp as
well, in many towns in Flanders and France, and there
were also beginnings in Spain, England and Germany.
Italy came later. The superb set in the Cluny Museum
in Paris, The Lady and the Unicorn, than which nothing
could be lovelier in poetic feeling as well as in technique,
is accorded to French looms. But as it is impossible in
a cursory survey to mention all, the two most important
cities are dwelt upon because it is from them that the
greatest amount of the best product emanated.

Tapestries could not well decline with the fortunes of
a town, for they were a heavy article of commerce at the
time when Louis XI attacked Arras. Trade was made
across the Channel, whence came the best wool for their
manufacture; they were bought by the French monarchs
and nobility; many drifted to Genoa and Italy, to be sold
by the active merchants of the times to whoever could
buy. When, therefore, Arras was crushed, her able
workmen flew to other centres of production, principally
[Pg 55]
in Flanders, notably to Bruges and Brussels, and helped
to bring these places into their high position.

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VERDURE

French Gothic Tapestry

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“ECCE HOMO”

Brussels Tapestry, about 1520. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Stories of kings and their magnificence breathe ever
of romance, but kings could not be magnificent were it
not for the labour of the conscientious common people,
those who go daily to their task, asking nothing better
than to live their little span in humble endeavour.
The weavers, the tapissiers of that far-away time in
Flanders are intensely appealing now when their beautiful
work hangs before us to-day. They send us a
friendly message down through the centuries. It is this
makes us inquire a bit into the conditions of their lives,
and so we find them scattered through the country north
of France working with single-hearted devotion toward
the perfection of their art. That they arrived there, we
know by such tapestries as are left us of their time.

Bruges was the home of a movement in art similar to
that occurring in Italy. Old traditions of painting were
being thrown aside—the revolution even attacking the
painter’s medium, tempera, which was criticised, discarded
and replaced by oil on the palettes. Memling,
the brothers Van Eyck, were painting things as they saw
them, not as rules prescribed. Bernard Van Orley was
at work with bold originality.

It were strange if this Northern school of painters had
not influenced all art near by. It is to these men that
Brussels owes the beauty of her tapestries in that apogee
of Gothic art which immediately preceded the introduction
of the Renaissance from Italy.

Cartoons or drawings for tapestries took on the rules
[Pg 56]
of composition of these talented and original men. Easily
distinguishable is the strong influence of the religious
feeling, the fidelity to standards of the church. When
a rich townsman wished to express his praise or gratitude
to God, he ordered for the church an altar-piece or dainty
gilded Gothic carving to frame the painted panels of
careful execution. When Jean de Rome executed a cartoon,
he treated it in much the same way; built up an
airy Gothic structure and filled the spaces with pretty
pictures. The so-called Mazarin tapestry of Mr. Morgan’s
shows this treatment at its best. Unhappily, the
atelier of Jean de Rome or Jan von Room is too sketchily
portrayed in the book of the past; its records are faint
and elusive. We only hear now and then an interested
allusion, a suggestion that this or that beautiful specimen
of work has come from his atelier.

Cartoons at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century
were not all divided into their different scenes by Gothic
column and arch. In much of the fine work there was
no division except a natural one, for the picture began to
develop the modern scheme of treating but one scene in
one picture. Although this might be filled with many
groups, yet all formed a harmonious whole. The practice
then fell into disuse of repeating the same individual
many times in one picture.

A good example of the change and improvement in
drawing which assisted in making Brussels’ supremacy
and in bringing Gothic art to perfection, is the fine hanging
in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. (Plate
facing page 57.) It depicts with beautiful naïveté and
[Pg 57]
much realism the discomfiture of Pharaoh and his army
floundering in the Red Sea, while the serene and elegant
children of Israel contemplate their distress with well-bred
calm from the flowery banks of an orderly park.

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ALLEGORICAL SUBJECT

Flemish Tapestry, about 1500. Collection of Alfred W. Hoyt, Esq.

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CROSSING THE RED SEA

Brussels Tapestry, about 1500. Boston Museum of Fine Arts

This tapestry illustrates so many of the important features
of work during the first period of Brussels’
supremacy that it is to be lingered over, dissected and
tasted like a dessert of nuts and wine. Should one speak
first of the cartoon or of the weave, of the artist or of the
craftsmen? If it is to be the tapissier, then to him all
credit, for in this and similar work he has reached a care
in execution and a talent in translation that are inspired.
Such quantity of detail, so many human faces with their
varying expressions, could only be woven by the most
adroit tapissier.

The drawing shows, first, one scene of many groups
but a sole interest, with none but probable divisions.
Much grace and freedom is shown in the attitudes of the
persons on the shore, and strenuous effort and despair
among the engulfed soldiers. Extreme attention to detail,
the making one part as finished as another, even to
the least detail, is noticeable. The exaggerated patterns
of the stuffs observable in earlier work is absent, and a
sense of proportion is displayed in dress ornament. The
free movement of men and beasts, and the variety of
facial expression all show the immense strides made in
drawing and the perfection attained in this brilliant
period.

It was a time when the artist perfected the old style
and presaged the new, the years before the Renaissance
[Pg 58]
had left its cradle and marched over Europe. This perfection
of the Gothic ideal has a purity and simplicity
that can never fail to appeal to all who feel that sincerity
is the basic principle of art as it is of character. The
style of Quentin Matsys, of the Van Eycks, was the mode
at the end of the Fifteenth Century and the beginning of
the Sixteenth, and after all this lapse of time it seems to
us a sweet and natural expression of admirable human
attributes.

In the new wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, the labels of certain exhibits, purchases and
loans allude briefly to “studio of Jean de Rome.” It is an
allusion which especially interests us, as our country now
holds examples of this atelier which make us wish to
know more about its master. He was a designer in the
marvellous transition period of about 1500, when art
trembled between the restraint of ecclesiastic Gothic and
the voluptuous freedom of the Renaissance; hesitated between
the conventions of religion and the abandonment
to luxury, to indulgence of the senses. It is the fashion
to regard periods of transition as times of decadence, of
false standards of hybrid production, but at least they are
full of deepest interest to the student of design who finds
in the tremulous dawn of the new idea a flush which
beautifies the last years of the old method.

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THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN

Flemish Tapestry, about 1510. Collection of J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq.,
New York

Attributed to this newly unearthed studio of Jean de
Rome hangs a marvellous tapestry in the new wing alluded
to, one which deserves repeated visits. (Plate facing
page 58.) Indeed, to see it once creates the desire to
see it again, so beautiful is it in drawing and so exquisite
[Pg 59]
in colour and weave. It is suggested that Quentin
Matsys is responsible for the drawing, and it is known
that only Bruges or Brussels could produce such perfection
of textile. Indeed, Jean de Rome is by some authorities
spoken of as Jean de Brussels, for it is there that he
worked long and well, assisting to produce those wonders
of textile art that have never been surpassed, not even by
the Gobelins factory in the Seventeenth Century. The
tapestry in the Metropolitan Museum is now the property
of J. Pierpont Morgan, Esq., but began life as the
treasure of the King and Queen of Spain who, at the
time when Brussels was producing its best, were sitting
firmly on a throne but just wrested from the Saracenic
occupancy. Spain, while unable to establish famous
and enduring tapestry factories of her own, yet
was known always as a lavish buyer. Later, Cardinal
Mazarin, with his trained Italian eye, detected at once
the value of the tapestry and became possessed of it, counting
it among his best treasures of art. It is a woven representation
of the triptych, so favourite in the time of the
Van Eycks, and is almost as rich with gold as those ancient
altar decorations. The tapestry is variously called
The Kingdom of Heaven, and The Adoration of the
Eternal Father and is the most beautiful and important
of its kind in America. Fortunate they who can go to
the museum to see it—only less fortunate than those who
can go to see it many times.

In the private collection of Martin A. Ryerson, Esq.,
of Chicago, are three examples of great perfection. They
belonged to the celebrated art collection of Baron Spitzer,
[Pg 60]
which fact, apart from their beauty, gives them renown.
The first of these (plate facing page 60) is an appearance
of Christ to the Magdalen after the Entombment,
and is Flemish work of late in the Fifteenth Century. It
is woven in silk and gold with infinite skill. With exquisite
patience the weaver has brought out the crowded
detail in the distance; indeed, it is this background,
stretching away to the far sky, past the Tomb, beyond
towns and plains of fruited trees to yet more cities set on
a hill, that constitutes the greatest charm of the picture,
and which must have brought hours of happy toil to the
inspired weaver.

The second tapestry of Mr. Ryerson’s three pieces is also
Flemish of the late Fifteenth Century. (Plate facing
page 61.) This small group of the Holy Family shows
at its best the conscientious work of the time, a time
wherein man regarded labour as a means of worshipping
his God. The subject is treated by both artist and weaver
with that loving care which approaches religion. The
holy three are all engaged in holding bunches of grapes,
while the Child symbolically spills their juice into a
chalice. Other symbols are found in the book and the
cross-surmounted globe. A background of flat drapery
throws into beautiful relief the inspired faces of the
group. Behind this stretches the miniature landscape,
but the foreground is unfretted by detail, abounding in
the repose of the simple surfaces of the garments of
Mother and Child. By a subtle trick of line, St. Joseph
is separated from the holier pair. The border is the
familiar well-balanced Gothic composition of flower,
[Pg 61]
fruit, and leaf, all placed as though by the hand of Nature.
The materials used are silk and gold, but one might well
add that the soul of the weaver also entered into the fabric.

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FLEMISH TAPESTRY, END OF FIFTEENTH CENTURY

Collection of Martin A. Ryerson, Esq., Chicago. Formerly in the
Spitzer Collection

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THE HOLY FAMILY

Flemish Tapestry, end of Fifteenth Century. Collection of Martin A. Ryerson,
Esq., Chicago. Formerly in the Spitzer Collection

The third piece from the Spitzer collection bears all
those marks of exquisite beauty with which Italy was
teeming in the Fifteenth Century. (Colour plate facing
page 82.) Weavers from Brussels went down into Italy
and worked under the direction of Italian artists who
drew the designs. Andrea Mantegna was one of these.
The patron of the industry was the powerful Gonzaga
family. This tapestry of The Annunciation which Mr.
Ryerson is so fortunate as to hang in his collection, is
decorated with the arms of the Gonzaga family. The
border of veined marble, the altar of mosaics and fine
relief, the architecture of the outlying baptistry, the
wreathed angel, all speak of Italy in that lovely moment
when the Gothic had not been entirely abandoned and
the Renaissance was but an opening bud.

The highest work of painter and weaver—artists both—continued
through thirty or forty years. Pity it is, the
time had not been long enough for more remains of it to
have come to us than those that scantily supply museums.
After the Gothic perfection came the great change made
in Flanders by the introduction of the Renaissance.

It came through the excellence of the weavers. It was
not the worth of the artists that brought Brussels its greatest
fame, but the humbler work of its tapissiers. Their
lives, their endeavours counted more in textile art than
did the Flemish school of painting. No such weavers
existed in all the world. They were bound together as
[Pg 62]
a guild, had restrictions and regulations of their own that
would shame a trades union of to-day, and in change of
politics had scant consideration from new powers. But
in the end they were the ones to bring fame to the Brussels
workshops.

In 1528 they were banded together by organisation,
and from that time on their work is easily followed and
identified. It was in that year that a law was made compelling
weavers—and allowing weavers—to incorporate
into the encompassing galloon of the tapestry the Brussels
Brabant mark of two B’s with a shield between. And it
was about this time and later that the celebrated family
of weavers named Pannemaker came into prominence
through the talent of Wilhelm de Pannemaker, he who
accompanied the Emperor Charles V on his expedition
to Tunis.

This expedition flaunts itself in the set of tapestries
now in Madrid. (Plate facing page 62.) The emperor
seems, from our point of view, to have done it all with
dramatic forethought. There was his special artist on
the spot, Jan Vermeyen, to draw the superb cartoons, and
accompanying him was Wilhelm de Pannemaker, the
ablest weaver of his day, to set the loom and thrust the
shuttle. Granada was the place selected for the weaving,
and the finest of wool was set aside for it, besides lavish
amounts of silk, and pounds of silver and gold. In three
years, by the help of eighty workmen, Pannemaker completed
his colossal task. Such was the master-weaver of
the Sixteenth Century.

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CONQUEST OF TUNIS BY CHARLES V (DETAIL)

Cartoon by Jan Vermeyen. Woven by Pannemaker. Royal Collection at Madrid

As for Pannemaker’s imperial patron, John Addington
[Pg 63]
Symonds discriminatingly says of him: “Like a gale
sweeping across a forest of trees in blossom, and bearing
their fertilising pollen to far distant trees, the storm of
Charles Fifth’s army carried far and wide through Europe
the productive energy of the Renaissance.”

[Pg 64]

CHAPTER VI

RENAISSANCE INFLUENCE

BRUSSELS in 1515, with her workmen at the
zenith of their perfection, was given the order to
weave the set of the Acts of the Apostles for the
Pope to hang in the Sistine Chapel. (Plate facing page
64.) The cartoons were by the great Raphael. Not
only did he draw the splendid scenes, but with his exquisite
invention elaborated the borders. Thus was set in
the midst of the Brussels ateliers a pattern for the new
art that was to retire the nice perfection of the previous
school of restraint. From that time, all was regulated
by new standards.

Before considering the change that came to designs
in tapestry, it is necessary that both mind and eye should
be literally savants in the Gothic. Without this the
greatest point in classifying and distinguishing is missed.
The dainty grace of the verdure and flowers, the exquisite
models of the architectural details, the honest, simple
scheme of colour, all these are distinguishing marks, but
to them is added the still greater one of the figures and
their grouping. In the very early work, these are few
in number, all equally accented in size and finish, but
later the laws of perspective are better understood, and
subordinates to the subject are drawn smaller. This gives
opportunity for increase in the number of personages, and
[Pg 65]
for the introduction of the horses and dogs and little wild
animals that cause a childish thrill of delight wherever
they are encountered, so like are they to the species that
haunt childhood’s fairyland.

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DEATH OF ANANIAS.—FROM ACTS OF THE APOSTLES BY RAPHAEL

From the Palace of Madrid

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THE STORY OF REBECCA

Brussels Tapestry. Sixteenth Century. Collection of Arthur Astor Carey,
Esq., Boston

Indeed, the Gothic tapestries more than any other existing
pictures take us back to that epoch of our lives when
we lived in romance, when the Sleeping Beauty hid in
just such towers, when the prince rode such a horse and
appeared an elegant young knight. The inscrutable
mystery of those folk of other days is like the inscrutable
mystery of that childhood time, the Mediæval time of the
imagination, and those of us who remember its joys gaze
silent and happy in the tapestry room of the Ducal Palace
at Nancy, or in Mary’s Chamber at Holyrood, or in
any place whatever where hang the magic pictured
cloths.

When the highest development of a style is reached
a change is sure to come. It may be a degeneration, or
it may be the introduction of a new style through some
great artistic impulse either native or introduced by contact
with an outside influence. Fortunately, the Gothic
passed through no pallid process of deterioration. The
examples that nest comfortably in the museums of the
world or in the homes of certain fortunate owners, do
not contain marks of decadence—only of transition. It
is a style that was replaced, but not one that died the
death of decadence.

It is with reluctance that one who loves the Gothic
will leave it for the more recent art of the Renaissance.
Its charm is one that embodies chasteness, grace, and
[Pg 66]
simplicity, one that is so exquisitely finished, and so individual
that the mind and eye rest lovingly upon its decorative
expressions. It is averred that the introduction of the
revived styles of Greece and Rome into France destroyed
an art superior. One is inclined to this opinion in studying
a tapestry of the highest Gothic expression, a finished
product of the artist and the craftsman, both having given
to its execution their honest labour and highest skill. Unhappily
it is often, with the tapestry lover, a case similar
to that of the penniless boy before the bakeshop window—you
may look, but you may not have,—for not
often are tapestries such as these for sale. Only among
the experienced dealer-collectors is one fortunate enough
to find these rare remnants of the past which for colour,
design and texture are unsurpassed.

But the Gothic was bound to give way as a fashion
in design. Politics of Europe were at work, and men
were more easily moving about from one country to
another. The cities of the various provinces over which
the Burgundian dukes had ruled were prevented by
natural causes, from being united. Arras, Ghent, Liége
instead of forming a solidarity, were separate units of
interest. This made the subjugation of one or the other
an easy matter to the tyrant who oppressed. As Arras
declined under the misrule of Charles le Téméraire
(whose possessions at one time outlined the whole northern
and eastern border of France) Brussels came into
the highest prominence as a source of the finest tapestries.

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THE CREATION

Flemish Tapestry. Italian Cartoon, Sixteenth Century

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THE ORIGINAL SIN

Flemish Tapestry. Italian Cartoon, Sixteenth Century

The great change in tapestries that now occurs is the
same that altered all European art and decoration and
[Pg 67]
architecture. Indeed it cannot be limited to these evidences
alone, for it affected literature, politics, religion,
every intellectual evidence. Man was breaking his bonds
and becoming freed for centuries to come. The time
was well-named for the new birth. Like another Birth
of long ago, it occurred in the South, and its influence
gradually spread over the entire civilised world. The
Renaissance, starting in Italy, gradually flushed the whole
of Europe with its glory. Artists could not be restrained.
Throbbing with poetry to be expressed, they threw off
design after design of inspired beauty and flooded the
world with them. The legitimate field of painting was
not large enough for their teeming originality which pre-empted
also the field of decorative design as well. Many
painters apprenticed themselves to goldsmiths and silversmiths
to become yet more cunning in the art of minute
design, and the guilds of Florence held the names best
known in the fine arts.

Tapestry weaving seems a natural expression in the
North, the impulsive supplying of a local need. Possibly
Italy felt no such need throughout the Middle Ages.
However that may be, when her artists composed designs
for woven pictures there were no permanent artisans at
home of sufficient skill to weave them.

But up in the North, craftsmen were able to produce
work of such brilliant and perfect execution that the great
artists of Italy were inspired to draw cartoons. And
so it came, that to make sure of having their drawings
translated into wool and silk with proper artistic feeling,
the cartoons of Raphael were bundled off by trusty
[Pg 68]
carriers to the ateliers of Flanders. Thus Italy got her
tapestries of the Renaissance, and thus Flanders acquired
by inoculation the rich art of the Renaissance.

The direct cause of the change in Flemish style of
tapestries was in this way brought about by the Renaissance
of Italy. New rules of drawing were dominating.
Changes were slower when travelling was difficult, and
the average of literacy was low; but gradually there came
creeping up to Brussels cartoon after cartoon in the new
method, for her skilled workmen to transpose into wool
and silk and metal, “thread of Arras,” and “gold and
silver of Cyprus.” Italy had the artists, Brussels had the
craftsmen—what happier combination could be made
than the union of these two? Thus was the great change
brought about in tapestries, and this union is the great
fact to be borne in mind about the difference between the
Gothic tapestries and those which so quickly succeeded
them.

From now on the old method is abandoned, not only in
Brussels, but everywhere that the high-warp looms are
set up. The “art nouveau” of that day influenced every
brush and pencil. The great crowding of serried hosts
on a single field disappeared, and fewer but perfect figures
played their parts on the woven surface. Wherever
architectural details, such as porticoes or columns, were
introduced, these dropped the old designs of “pointed”
style or battlements, and took on the classic or the high
Renaissance that ornaments the façade of Pavia’s Certosa.
One by one the wildwood flowers receded before
the advance of civilisation, very much as those in the
[Pg 69]
veritable land are wont to do, and their place was taken
by a verdure as rich as the South could produce, with
heavy foliage and massive blossoms.

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MELEAGER AND ATALANTA

Flemish design, second half of Seventeenth Century. Woven in Paris workshops
by Charles de Comans

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PUNIC WAR SERIES

Brussels Tapestry. Sixteenth Century. Collection of Arthur Astor Carey,
Esq., Boston

It is impossible to overestimate the importance to Brussels
of the animating experience and distinguished commission
of executing the set of tapestries for the Sistine
Chapel after cartoons by Raffaelo Sanzio. The date is
one to tie to (1515) and the influence of the work was
far-reaching. The Gothic method could no longer continue.

The Renaissance spread its influence, established its
standards and introduced that wave of productiveness
which always followed its introduction. There are many
who doubt the superiority of the voluptuous art of the
high Renaissance. There are those who prefer (perhaps
for reasons of sentiment) the early Gothic, and many
more who love far better the sweet purity of the early
Renaissance. Before us Raphael presents his full figures
replete with action, rich with broad, open curves in
nudity, and magnificent with lines of flowing drapery.
To him be accorded all due honour; but, if it is the privilege
of the artist’s spirit to wander still on earth, he must
find his particular post-mortem punishment in viewing
the deplorable school of exaggeration which his example
founded. Who would not prefer one of the chaste
tapestries of perfected Gothic to one of those which followed
Raphael, imitating none of his virtues, exaggerating
his faults? It is these followers, the virilities of
whose false art is as that of weeds, who have come almost
to our own day and who have succeeded in spoiling the
[Pg 70]
historical aspect of the New Testament for many an
imaginative Sunday-school attendant by giving us Bible
folk in swarthy undress, in lunatic beards and in unwearable
drapings. These terrible persons, descendants of
Raphael’s art, can never stir a human sympathy.

Just here a word must be said of the workmen, the
weavers of Brussels. For them certain fixed rules were
made, but also they were allowed much liberty in execution.
The artist might draw the big cartoons and thus
become the governing influence, but much of the choice
of colour and thread was left to the weaver. This made
of him a more important factor in the composition than
a mere artisan; he was, in fact, an artist, must needs be,
to execute a work of such sublimity as the Raphael set.

And as a weaver, his patience was without limit.
Thread by thread, the warp was set, and thread by thread
the woof was woven and coerced into place by the relentless
comb of the weaver. Perhaps a man might make
a square foot, by a week of close application; but “how
much” mattered nothing—it was “how well” that counted.
Haste is disassociable from labour of our day; we might
produce—or reproduce—tapestries as good as the old,
but some one is in haste for the hanging, and excellency
goes by the board. The weaver of those days of perfection
was content to be a weaver, felt his ambition gratified
if his work was good.

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EPISODE IN THE LIFE OF CÆSAR

Flemish Tapestry. Sixteenth Century. Gallery of the Arazzi, Florence

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WILD BOAR HUNT

Flemish Cartoon and Weaving, Sixteenth Century. Gallery of the Arazzi,
Florence

Peter van Aelst was the master chosen to execute the
Raphael tapestries, and the pieces were finished in three
or four years. Those who think present-day prices high,
should think on the fact that Pope Leo X paid $130,000
[Pg 71]
for the execution of the tapestries, which in 1515 counted
for more than now. Raphael received $1,000 each for
the cartoons, almost all of which are now guarded in
England. The tapestries after a varied history are resting
safely in the Vatican, a wonder to the visitor.

When Van Aelst had finished his magnificent work, the
tapestries were sent to Rome. Those who go now to the
Sistine Chapel to gaze upon Michael Angelo’s painted
ceiling, and the panelled sidewalls of Botticelli and other
cotemporary artists, are more than intoxicated with the
feast. But fancy what the scene must have been when
Pope Leo X summoned his gorgeous guard and cardinals
around him in this chapel enriched also with the splendour
of these unparalleled hangings.

And thus it came that Italy held the first place—almost
the only place—in design, and Brussels led in manufacture.

In 1528 appeared a mark on Brussels’ tapestries which
distinguished them from that time on. Prior to that their
works, except in certain authenticated instances, are not
always distinguishable from those of other looms—of
which many existed in many towns. The mark alluded
to is the famous one of two large B’s on either side of a
shield or scutcheon. This was woven into a plain band
on the border, and the penalty for its misuse was the no
small one of the loss of the right hand—the death of the
culprit as a weaver. This mark and its laws were intended
to discourage fraud, to promote perfection and to
conserve a high reputation for weavers as well as for
dealers.

[Pg 72]

CHAPTER VII

RENAISSANCE TO RUBENS

WHEN the Raphael cartoons first came to Brussels
the new method was a little difficult for
the tapissier. His hand had been accustomed
to another manner. He had, too, been allowed much liberty
in his translations—if one may so call the art of
reproducing a painted model on the loom. He might
change at will the colour of a drapery, even the position of
a figure, and, most interesting fact, he had on hand a supply
of stock figures that he might use at will, making for
himself suitable combination. The figures of Adam and
Eve gave a certain cachet to hangings not entirely secular
and these were slipped in when a space needed filling.
There were also certain lovely ladies who might at one
time play the rôle of attendant at a feast al fresco, at
another time a character in an allegory. The weaver’s
hand was a little conventional when he began to execute
the Raphael cartoons, but during the three years required
for their execution he lost all restriction and was ready
for the freer manner.

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VERTUMNUS AND POMONA

First half of Sixteenth Century. Royal Collection of Madrid

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VERTUMNUS AND POMONA

First half of Sixteenth Century. Royal Collection of Madrid

It must not be supposed the Flemish artists were content
to let the Italians entirely usurp them in the drawing
of cartoons. The lovely refinement of the Bruges
school having been thrust aside, the Fleming tried his
hand at the freer method, not imitating its classicism but
[Pg 73]
giving his themes a broader treatment. The Northern
temperament failed to grasp the spirit of the South, and
figures grew gross and loose in the exaggerated drawing.
Borders, however, show no such deterioration; the attention
to detail to which the old school was accustomed
was here continued and with good effect. No stronger
evidence is needed than some of these half savage portrayals
of life in the Sixteenth Century to declare the
classic method an exotic in Flanders.

But with the passing of the old Gothic method, there
was little need for other cartoonists than the Italian, so
infinitely able and prolific were they. Andrea del Sarto,
Titian, Paolo Veronese, Giulio Romano, these are among
the artists whose work went up to Brussels workshops
and to other able looms of the day. We can fancy
the fair face of Andrea’s wife being lovingly caressed
by the weaver’s fingers in his work; we can imagine the
beauties of Titian, the sumptuousness of Veronese’s
feasts, and the fat materialism of Giulio Romano’s heavy
cherubs, all contributing to the most beautiful of textile
arts.

Still earlier, Mantegna supplied a series of idealised
Pompeian figures exquisitely composed, set in a lacy
fancy of airy architectural detail, in which he idealised
all the gods of Olympus. Each fair young goddess, each
strong and perfect god, stood in its particular niche and
indicated its penchant by a tripod, a peacock, an apple
or a caduceus, as clue to the proper name. Such airy
beauty, such dainty conception, makes of the gods rulers of
æsthetics, if not of fate. This series of Mantegna was
[Pg 74]
the inspiration two centuries later of the Triumphs of
the Gods, and similar hangings of the newly-formed
Gobelins.

Giulio Romano drew, among other cartoons, a set of
Children Playing, which were the inspiration later at the
Gobelins for Lebrun’s Enfants Jardiniers.

As classic treatment was the mode in the Sixteenth
Century, so classic subject most appealed. The loves and
adventures of gods and heroes gave stories for an infinite
number of sets. As it was the fashion to fill a room with
a series, not with miscellaneous and contrasting bits, several
tapestries similar in subject and treatment were a
necessity. The gods were carried through their adventures
in varying composition, but the borders in all the
set were uniform in style and measurement.

In those prolific days, when ideas were crowding fast
for expression, the border gave just the outlet necessary
for the superfluous designs of the artist. He was wont
to plot it off into squares with such architectonic fineness
as Mina da Fiesole might have used, and to make of
each of these a picture or a figure so perfect that in
itself it would have sufficient composition for an entire
tapestry. All honour to such artists, but let us never
once forget that without the skill and talent of the
master-weaver these beauties would never have come
down to us.

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VERTUMNUS AND POMONA

First half of Sixteenth Century. Royal Collection of Madrid

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VERTUMNUS AND POMONA

First half of Sixteenth Century. Royal Collection of Madrid

The collection of George Blumenthal, Esquire, of New
York, contains as beautiful examples of Sixteenth Century
composition and weaving as could be imagined.
Two of these were found in Spain—the country which
[Pg 75]
has ever hoarded her stores of marvellous tapestries.
They represent the story of Mercury. (Frontispiece.)
The cartoon is Italian, and so perfect is its drawing, so
rich in invention is the exquisite border, that the name of
Raphael is half-breathed by the thrilled observer. But
if the artist is not yet certainly identified, the name of
the weaver is certain, for on the galloon he has left his
sign. It is none other than the celebrated Wilhelm de
Pannemaker.

In addition to this is the shield and double B of the
Brussels workshop, which after 1528 was a requirement
on all tapestries beyond a certain small size. In 1544
the Emperor Charles V made a law that the mark or
name of the weaver and the mark of his town must be
put in the border. It was this same Pannemaker of the
Blumenthal tapestries who wove in Spain the Conquest
of Tunis for Charles V. (Plate facing page 62.)

Mr. Blumenthal’s tapestries must have carried with
them some such contract for fine materials as that which
attended the execution of the Tunis set, so superb are
they in quality. Indeed, gold is so lavishly used that
the border seems entirely made of it, except for the delicate
figures resting thereon. It is used, too, in an unusual
manner, four threads being thrown together to
make more resplendent the weave.

The beauty of the cartoon as a picture, the decorative
value of the broad surfaces of figured stuffs, the marvellous
execution of the weaver, all make the value of these
tapestries incalculable to the student and the lover of
decorative art. Mr. Blumenthal has graciously placed
[Pg 76]
them on exhibition in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York. Fortunate they who can absorb their beauty.

That treasure-house in Madrid which belongs to the
royal family contains a set which bears the same ear-marks
as the Blumenthal tapestries. It is the set called
The Loves of Vertumnus and Pomona. (Plates facing
pages 72, 73,
74 and 75.) Here is the same manner of
dress, the same virility, the same fulness of decoration.
Yet the Mercury is drawn with finer art.

The delight in perfected detail belonging to the Italian
school of artists resulted in an arrangement of grotesques.
Who knows that the goldsmith’s trade was not
responsible for these tiny fantastics, as so many artists
began as apprentices to workers in gold and silver? This
evidence of talented invention must be observed, for it
set the fashion for many a later tapestry, notably the
Grotesque Months of the Seventeenth Century. Mingled
with verdure and fruit, it is seen in work of the Eighteenth
Century. But in its original expression is it the most
talented. There we find that intellectual plan of design,
that building of a perfect whole from a subtle combination
of absolutely irreconcilable and even fabulous objects.
Yet all is done with such beguiling art that both
mind and eye are piqued and pleased with the impossible
blending of realism and imagination.

Bacchiacca drew a filigree of attenuated fancies, threw
them on a ground of single delicate colour, and sent them
for weave to the celebrated masters, John Rost and Nicholas
Karcher. (Plates facing pages 84
and 85.) These
[Pg 77]
men at that time (1550) had set their Flemish looms in
Italy.

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TAPESTRIES FOR HEAD AND SIDE OF BED

Renaissance designs. Royal Collection of Madrid

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THE STORY OF REBECCA

Brussels Tapestry. Sixteenth Century. Collection of Arthur Astor Carey,
Esq., Boston

And so it came that the Renaissance swept all before
it in the world of tapestry. More than that, with the
increase of culture and of wealth, with the increased
mingling of the peoples of Europe after the raid of
Charles V into Italy, the demand for tapestries enormously
increased. They were wanted for furnishing of
homes, they were wanted as gifts—to brides, to monarchs,
to ambassadors. And they were wanted for splendid
decoration in public festivals. They had passed beyond
the stage of rarity and had become almost as much a
matter of course as clothing.

Brussels being in the ascendency as a producer, the
world looked to her for their supply, and thereby came
trouble. More orders came than it was possible to fill.
The temptation was not resisted to accept more work than
could be executed, for commercialism has ever a hold.
The result was a driving haste. The director of the
ateliers forced his weavers to quick production. This
could mean but one thing, the lessening of care in every
department.

Gradually it came about that expedition in a tapissier,
the ability to weave quickly, was as great a desideratum
as fine work. Various other expedients were resorted to
beside the Sixteenth Century equivalent of “Step lively.”
Large tapestries were not set on a single loom, but
were woven in sections, cunningly united when finished.
In this manner more men could be impressed into the
[Pg 78]
manufacture of a single piece. A wicked practice was
introduced of painting or dyeing certain woven parts in
which the colours had been ill-selected.

All these things resulted in constantly increasing restrictions
by the guild of tapissiers and by order of royal
patrons. But fraud is hard to suppress when the animus
of the perpetrator is wrong. Laws were made to stop
one fault after another, until in the end the weavers were
so hampered by regulations that work was robbed of all
enthusiasm or originality.

It was at this time that Brussels adopted the low-warp
loom. In other words, after a brilliant period of prolific
and beautiful production, Brussels began to show signs
of deterioration. Her hour of triumph was past. It had
been more brilliant than any preceding, and later times
were never able to touch the same note of purity coupled
with perfection. The reason for the decline is known,
but reasons are of scant interest in the face of the deplorable
fact of decadence.

The Italian method of drawing cartoons was adopted
by the Flemish cartoonists at this time, but as it was an
adoption and not a natural expression of inborn talent,
it fell short of the high standard of the Renaissance. But
that is not to say that we of to-day are not ready to worship
the fruit of the Italian graft on Flemish talent. A
tapestry belonging to the Institute of Art in Chicago well
represents this hybrid expression of drawing. (Plate
facing page 78.) The principal figures are inspired by
such as are seen in the Mercury of Mr. Blumenthal’s collection,
or the Vertumnus and Pomona series, but there
[Pg 79]
the artist stopped and wandered off into his traditional
Flemish landscape with proper Flemings in the background
dressed in the fashion of the artist’s day.

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BRUSSELS TAPESTRY. LATE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Weaver, Jacques Geubels. Institute of Art, Chicago

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MEETING OF ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA

Brussels Tapestry. Woven by Gerard van den Strecken. Cartoon attributed
to Rubens

The border was evidently inspired by Raphael’s classic
figures and arabesques, but the column of design is naïvely
broken by the far perspective of a formal garden. The
Italian cartoonist would have built his border, figure and
arabesque, one above another like a fantastic column
(vide Mr. Blumenthal’s Mercury border). The Fleming
saw the intricacy, the multiplied detail, but missed
the intellectual harmony. But, such trifles apart, the
Flemish examples of this style that have come to us are
thrilling in their beauty of colour, and borders such as
this are an infinite joy. This tapestry was woven about
the last quarter of the Sixteenth Century by a weaver
named Jacques Geubels of Brussels, who was employed
by Carlier, a merchant of Antwerp.

As the fruit of the Renaissance graft on Flanders coarsened
and deteriorated, a new influence arose in the Low
Countries, one that was bound to submerge all others.
Rubens appeared and spread his great decorative surfaces
before eyes that were tired of hybrid design. This great
scene-painter introduced into all Europe a new method
in his voluptuous, vigorous work, a method especially
adapted to tapestry weaving. It is not for us to quarrel
with the art of so great a master. The critics of painting
scarce do that; but in the lesser art of tapestry the change
brought about by his cartoons was not a happy one.

His great dramatic scenes required to be copied directly
from the canvas, no liberty of line or colour could
[Pg 80]
be allowed the weaver. In times past, the tapissier—with
talent almost as great as that of the cartoonist—altered
at his discretion. Even he to whom the Raphael
cartoons were entrusted changed here and there the work
of the master.

But now he was expected to copy without license for
change. In other words, the time was arriving when
tapestries were changing from decorative fabrics into
paintings in wool. It takes courage to avow a distaste
for the newer method, seeing what rare and beautiful
hangings it has produced. But after a study of the purely
decorative hangings of Gothic and Renaissance work, how
forced and false seem the later gods. The value of the
tapestries is enormous, they are the work of eminent men—but
the heart turns away from them and revels again
in the Primitives and the Italians of the Cinque Cento.

Repining is of little avail. The mode changes and
tastes must change with it. If the gradual decadence
after the Renaissance was deplorable, it was well that a
Rubens rose in vigour to set a new and vital copy. To
meet new needs, more tones of colour and yet more, were
required by the weaver, and thus came about the making
of woven pictures.

As one picture is worth many pages of description, it
were well to observe the examples given (plate facing
page 79) of the superb set of Antony and Cleopatra, a
series of designs attributed to Rubens, executed in Brussels
by Gerard van den Strecken. This set is in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.

[Pg 81]

CHAPTER VIII

ITALY

FIFTEENTH THROUGH SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

THE history of tapestry in Italy is the story of the
great families, their romances and achievements.
These families were those which furnished rulers
of provinces—kings, almost—which supplied popes as
well, and folk who thought a powerful man’s pleasurable
duty was to interest himself seriously in the arts.

With the fine arts all held within her hand, it was but
logical that Italy should herself begin to produce the
tapestries she was importing from the land of the barbarians
as those beyond her northern borders were arrogantly
called. First among the records is found the name
of the Gonzaga family which called important Flemish
weavers down to Mantua, and there wove designs of
Mantegna, in the highest day of their factory’s production,
about 1450.

Duke Frederick of Urbino is one of the early Italian
patrons of tapestry whose name is made unforgettable in
this connexion by the product of the factory he established
toward the end of the Fifteenth Century, at his court in
the little duchy which included only the space reaching
from the Apennines to the Adriatic and from Rimini to
Ancona. The chief work of this factory was the History
of Troy which cost the generous and enthusiastic duke a
hundred thousand dollars.

[Pg 82]
The great d’Este family was one to follow persistently
the art, possibly because it habited the northern part of
the peninsula and was therefore nearer Flanders, but more
probably because the great Duke of Ferrara was animated
by that superb pride of race that chafes at rivalry; this,
added to a wish to encourage art, and the lust of possession
which characterised the great men of that day.

It was the middle of the Sixteenth Century that Ercole
II, the head of the d’Este family, revived at Ferrara the
factory of his family which had suffered from the wars.
The master-weavers were brought from Flanders, not only
to produce tapestries almost unequalled for technical perfection,
but to instruct local weavers. These two important
weavers were Nicholas and John Karcher or Carcher
as it is sometimes spelled, names of great renown—for a
weaver might be almost as well known and as highly esteemed
as the artist of the cartoons in those days when
artisan’s labour had not been despised by even the great
Leonardo. The foremost artist of the Ferrara works was
chosen from that city, Battista Dosso, but also active as
designer was the Fleming, Lucas Cornelisz. In Dosso’s
work is seen that exquisite and dainty touch that characterises
the artists of Northern Italy in their most perfect
period, before voluptuous masses and heavy scroll-like
curves prevailed even in the drawing of the human figure.

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THE ANNUNCIATION

Italian Tapestry. Fifteenth Century. Collection of Martin A. Ryerson, Esq.,
Chicago

The House of Este had a part to play in the visit of the
Emperor Charles V when he elected to be crowned with
Lombardy’s Iron Crown, in 1530, at Bologna instead of
in the cathedral at Monza where the relic has its home.
“Crowns run after me; I do not run after them,” he said,
[Pg 83]
with the arrogance of success. At this reception at
Bologna we catch a glimpse of the brilliant Isabella
d’Este amid all the magnificence of the occasion. It
takes very little imagination to picture the effect of the
public square at Bologna—the same buildings that stand
to-day—the square of the Palazzo Publico and the Cathedral—to
fancy these all hung with the immense woven
pictures with high lights of silk and gold glowing in the
sun, and through this magnificent scene the procession
of mounted guards, of beautiful ladies, of church dignitaries,
with Charles V as the central object of pomp, wearing
as a clasp to the cope of state the great diamond found
on the field of Marat after the defeat of the Duke of
Burgundy. The members of the House of Este were
there with their courts and their protégés, their artists
and their literati, as well as with their display of riches
and gaiety.

The manufactory at Ferrara was now allowed to sell
to the public, so great was its success, and to it is owed
the first impetus given to the weaving in Italy and the
production of some of the finest hangings which time has
left for us to enjoy to-day. It is a sad commentary on
man’s lust of novelty that the factory at Ferrara was ultimately
abandoned by reason of the introduction into the
country of the brilliant metal-illuminated leathers of
Cordova. The factory’s life was comprised within the
space of the years 1534 to 1597, the years in which lived
Ercole II and Alfonso II, the two dukes of the House of
Este who established and continued it.

It was but little wonder that the great family of the
[Pg 84]
Medici looked with envious eyes on any innovation or
success which distinguished a family which so nearly approached
in importance its own. When Ercole d’Este
had fully proved the perfection of his new industry, the
weaving of tapestry, one of the Medici established for
himself a factory whereby he, too, might produce this
form of art, not only for the furtherance of the art, but
to supply his own insatiable desires for possession.

The Arazzeria Medicea was the direct result of the
jealousy of Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany, 1537-1574.
It was established in Florence with a success to
be anticipated under such powerful protection, and it
endured until that patronage was removed by the extinction
of the family in 1737.

It was to be expected that the artists employed were
those of note, yet in the general result, outside of delicate
grotesques, the drawing is more or less the far-away echo
of greater masters whose faults are reproduced, but
whose inspiration is not obtainable. After Michael
Angelo, came a passion for over-delineation of over-developed
muscles; after Raphael—came the debased
followers of his favourite pupil, Giulio Romano, who
had himself seized all there was of the carnal in Raphael’s
genius. But if there is something to be desired in the
composition and line of the cartoons of the Florentine
factory, there is nothing lacking in the consummate skill
of the weavers.

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ITALIAN TAPESTRY. MIDDLE OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Cartoon by Bacchiacca. Woven by Nicholas Karcher

See larger image

ITALIAN TAPESTRY. MIDDLE OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Cartoon by Bacchiacca. Woven by G. Rost

The same Nicholas Karcher who set the standard in
the d’Este works, gave of his wonderful skill to the Florentines,
and with him was associated John Rost. These
[Pg 85]
were both from Flanders, and although trade regulations
for tapestry workers did not exist in Italy, Duke Cosimo
granted each of these men a sufficient salary, a habitat,
as well as permission to work for outsiders, and in addition
paid them for all work executed for himself.

The subjects for the set of tapestries had entirely left
the old method of pious interpretation and of mediæval
allegory and revelled in pictured tales of the Scriptures
and of the gods and heroes of mystical Parnassus and of
bellicose Greece, not forgetting those dainty exquisite impossibilities
called grotesques. It was about the time of
the death of Cosimo I (1574), the founder of the
Medicean factory, that a new and unfortunate influence
came into the directorship of the designs. This was
the appointment of Stradano or Johan van der Straaten,
to give his Flemish name, as dominating artist.

He was a man without fine artistic feeling, one of those
whose eye delighted in the exaggerations of decadence
rather than in the restraint of perfect art. He was inspired,
not by past perfection of the Italians among
whom he came to live, but by those of the decline, and
on this he grafted a bit of Northern philistinism. His
brush was unfortunately prolific, and at this time the fine
examples of weaving set by Rost and Karcher had been
replaced by quicker methods so that after 1600 the tapestries
poured out were lamentably inferior. Florentine
tapestry had at this time much pretence, much vulgar
display in its drawing, missing the fine virtues of the
time when Cosimo I dictated its taste, the fine virtues of
“grace, gaiety and reflectiveness.”

[Pg 86]
Leo X, the great Medicean pope, was elected in 1513,
he who ordered the great Raphael set of the Acts of the
Apostles, but it was before the establishment of important
looms in Italy, so to Flanders and Van Aelst are due the
glory of first producing this series which afterward was
repeated many times, in the great looms of Europe. Leo
X emulated in the patronage of the arts his father
Lorenzo, well-named Magnificent. What Lorenzo did
in Florence, Leo X endeavoured to do in Rome; make
of his time and of his city the highest expression of culture.
His record, however, is so mixed with the corruption
of the time that its golden glory is half-dimmed.
It was from the licentiousness of cardinals and the
wanton revels of the Vatican in Leo’s time that young
Luther the “barbarian” fled with horror to nail up his
theses on the doors of the churches in Wittenberg.

The history of tapestry in Italy at the Seventeenth
Century was all in the hands of the great families. Italy
was not united under a single royal head, but was a heterogeneous
mass of dukedoms, of foreign invaders, with
the popes as the head of all. But Italy had experienced
a time of papal corruption, which had, as its effect, wars
of disintegration, the retarding of that unity of state
which has only recently been accomplished. State
patronage for the factories was not known, that steady
beneficent influence, changeless through changing reigns.
Popes and great families regulated art in all its manifestations,
and who shall say that envy and rivalry did not
act for its advancement.

See larger image

ITALIAN VERDURE. SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

The desire to imitate the cultivation and elegance of
[Pg 87]
Italy was what made returning invaders carry the Renaissance
into the rest of Europe; and in a lesser degree the
process was reversed when, in the Seventeenth Century,
a cardinal of the House of Barberini visited France and,
on viewing in the royal residences a superb display of
tapestries, his envy and ambition were aroused to the extent
of emulation. He could not, with all his power,
possess himself of the hangings that he saw, but he could,
and did, arrange to supply himself generously from another
source. He was the powerful Francesco Barberini,
the son of the pope’s brother (Pope Urban VIII,
1623-1644), and it was he who established the Barberini
Library and built from the ruins of Rome’s amphitheatres
and baths the great palace which to-day still dominates
the street winding up to its aristocratic elegance.
It was to adorn this palace that Cardinal Francesco established
ateliers and looms and set artists and weavers to
work. This tapestry factory is of especial interest to
America, for some of its chief hangings have come to rest
with us. The Mysteries of the Life and Death of Jesus
Christ, one set is called, and is the property of the Cathedral
of St. John, the Divine, in New York, donated by
Mrs. Clarke.

Cardinal Francesco Barberini chose as his artists those
of the school of Pietro di Cortona with Giovanni Francesco
Romanelli as the head master. The director of the
factory was Giacomo della Riviera allied with M.
Wauters, the Fleming.[13] The former was especially concerned
with the pieces now owned by the Cathedral of
[Pg 88]
St. John, the Divine, in New York, and which are signed
with his name. Romanelli was the artist of the cartoons,
and his fame is almost too well known to dwell upon.
His portrait, in tapestry, hangs in the Louvre, for in
Paris he gained much fame at the Court of Louis XIV,
where he painted portraits of the Grand Monarch, who
never wearied of seeing his own magnificence fixed on
canvas.

It was the hard fate of the Barberini family to lose
power and wealth after the death of their powerful member,
Pope Urban VIII, in 1644. Their wealth and influence
were the shining mark for the arrows of envy,
so it was to be expected that when the next pope, Innocent
X, was elected, they were robbed of riches and
driven out of the country into France. This ended for
a time the work of the tapestry factory, but later the
family returned and work was resumed to the extent of
weaving a superb series picturing scenes especially connected
with the glory of the family, and entitled History
of Urban VIII.

Although Italy is growing daily in power and riches
under her new policy of political unity, there were
dreary years of heavy expense and light income for many
of her famous families, and it was during such an era
that the Barberini family consented to let their tapestries
pass out from the doors of the palace they were woven to
decorate. In 1889, the late Charles M. Ffoulke, Esq.,
became the possessor of all the Barberini hangings, and
added them to his famous collection. Thus through the
enterprise and the fine artistic appreciation of Mr.
[Pg 89]
Ffoulke, is America able to enjoy the best expression of
Italian tapestry of the Seventeenth Century.

The part that Venice ever played in the history of tapestry
is the splendid one of consumer. In her Oriental
magnificence she exhibited in palace and pageant the
superb products of labour which others had executed.
Without tapestries her big stone palaces would have
lacked the note of soft luxury, without coloured hangings
her balconies would have been but dull settings for languid
ladies, and her water-parades would have missed
the wondrous colour that the Venetian loves. Yet to her
rich market flowed the product of Europe in such exhaustless
stream that she became connoisseur-consumer
only, nor felt the need of serious producing. Workshops
there were, from time to time, but they were as easily
abandoned as they were initiated, and they have left little
either to history or to museums. Venice was, in the Sixteenth
Century, not only a buyer of tapestries for her own
use, but one of the largest markets for the sale of hangings
to all Europe. Men and monarchs from all Christendom
went there to purchase. The same may be said
of Genoa, so that although these two cities had occasional
unimportant looms, their position was that of middleman—vendors
of the works of others. In addition to
this they were repairers and had ateliers for restoring,
even in those days.

[Pg 90]

CHAPTER IX

FRANCE

WORKING UP TO GOBELINS FACTORY

IN following the great sweep of tapestry production
we arrive now in France, there to stay until the
Revolution. The early beginnings were there,
briefly rivalling Arras, but Arras, as we have seen, caught
up the industry with greater zeal and became the ever-famous
leader of the Fifteenth Century, ceding to Brussels
in the Sixteenth Century, whence the high point of
perfection was carried to Paris and caused the establishment
of the Gobelins. The English development under
James I, we defer for a later considering.

Francis I stands, an over-dressed, ever ambitious figure,
at the beginning of things modern in French art. He
still smacks of the Middle Ages in many a custom, many
a habit of thought; his men clank in armour, in his
châteaux lurk the suggestion of the fortress, and his common
people are sunk in a dark and hopeless oppression.
Yet he himself darts about Europe with a springing gait
and an elegant manner, the type of the strong aristocrat
dispensing alike arts of war and arts of the Renaissance.

Was it his visits, bellicose though they were, to Italy
and Spain, that turned his observant eye to the luxury of
woven story and made him desire that France should produce
the same? The Sforza Castle at Milan had walls
enough of tapestry, the pageants of Leonardo da Vinci,
[Pg 91]
organised at royal command of the lovely Beatrice d’Este,
displayed the wealth of woven beauty over which Francis
had time to deliberate in those bad hours after the
battle at Milan’s noted neighbour, Pavia.

See larger image

THE FINDING OF MOSES

Gobelins, Seventeenth Century. Cartoon after Poussin. The Louvre Museum

See larger image

TRIUMPH OF JUNO

Gobelins under Louis XIV.

The attention of Francis was also turned much to
Spain through envy of that extraordinary man of luck
and ability, the Emperor Charles V, and from whom he
made abortive and sullen efforts to wrest Germany, Italy,
anything he could get. In his imprisonment in Madrid,
Francis had time in plenty on which to think of many
things, and why not on the wonderful tapestries of which
Spain has always had a collection to make envious the
rest of Europe. He might forget his two poor little
boys who were left as hostages on his release, but he forgot
not whatever contributes to the pleasure of life.
That peculiarity was one which was yielding luscious
fruit, however, for Francis was the bearer of the torch
of the Renaissance which was to illumine France with
the same fire that flashed and glowed over Italy. This
is a fact to remember in regard to the class of designs of
his own and succeeding periods in France.

How he got his ideas we can reasonably trace, and the
result of them was that he established a royal tapestry
factory in beautiful Fontainebleau, which lies hid in
grateful shade, stretching to flowered fields but a reasonable
distance from the distractions of Paris.

It pleased Francis—and perhaps the beautiful Diane
de Poitiers and Duchesse d’Étampes—to critique plays in
that tiny gem of a theatre at the palace, or to feed the
carp in the pool; but also it gave him pleasure to wander
[Pg 92]
into the rooms where the high-warp looms lifted their
utilitarian lengths and artists played at magic with the
wools.

Alas, one cannot dress this patronage of art with too
much of disinterestedness, for these marvellous weavings
were for the adornment of the apartments of the very
persons who caused their productions.

The grand idea of state ateliers had not yet come to
bless the industry. For this reason the factory at Fontainebleau
outlasted the reign of its founder, Francis I,
but a short time.

Nevertheless, examples of its works are still to be seen
and are of great beauty, notably those at the Museum of
the Gobelins in Paris. That a series called the History
of Diana was produced is but natural, considering the
puissance at court of the famous Diane de Poitiers.

When Francis’ son, Henri II, enfeebled in constitution
by the Spanish confinement, inherited the throne, it was
but natural that he should neglect the indulgences of
his father and prefer those of his own. The Fontainebleau
factory strung its looms and copied its cartoons and
produced, too, certain hangings for Henri’s wife, the terrible
Catherine de Medici, on which her vicious eyes
rested in forming her horrid plots; but Henri had ambitions
of his own, small ambitions beside those which
had to do with jealousy of Charles Quint. He let the
factory of Francis I languish, but carried on the art under
his own name and fame.

To give his infant industry a home he looked about
Paris and decided upon the Hôpital de la Trinité, an
[Pg 93]
institution where asylum was found for the orphans of
the city who seem, in the light of the general brutality
of the time, to have been even in more need of a home
than the parentless child of modern civilisation. A part
of the scheme was to employ in the works such children
as were sufficiently mature and clever to work and to
learn at least the auxiliary details of a craft that is also
an art.

In this way the sixty or so of the orphans of La Trinité
were given a means of earning a livelihood. Among
them was one whose name became renowned. This was
Maurice du Bourg, whose tapestries surpassed all others
of his time in this factory—an important factory, as being
one of the group that later was merged into the
Gobelins.

It must be remembered in identifying French tapestries
of this kind that things Gothic had been vanquished
by the new fashion of things Renaissance, and that all
models were Italian. Giulio Romano and his school of
followers were the mode in France, not only in drawing,
but in the revival of classic subject. This condition in
the art world found expression in a set of tapestries from
the factory of La Trinité that are sufficiently celebrated
to be set down in the memory with an underscoring.
This set was composed of fifteen pieces illustrating in
sweeping design and gorgeous colouring the History of
Mausolus and Artemisia. Intense local and personal
interest was given to the set by making an open secret
of the fact that by Artemisia, the Queen of Halicarnassus,
was meant the widowed Queen of France, Catherine
[Pg 94]
de Medici, who adored posing as the most famous of
widows and adding ancient glory to her living importance.
To this History French writers accord the important
place of inspirer of a distinctively French Renaissance.

The weaver being Maurice du Bourg, the chief of the
factory of La Trinité, the artists were Henri Lerambert
and Antoine Carron, but the set has been many times
copied in various factories, and Artemisia has symbolised
in turn two other widowed queens of France.

Into the throne of France climbed wearily a feeble
youth always under the influence of his mother, Catherine
de Medici; and then it was filled by two other incapable
and final Orleans monarchs, until at last by virtue
of inheritance and sword, it became the seat of that grand
and faulty Henri IV, King of Navarre. By fighting he
got his place, and the habit being strong upon him, he
was in eternal conflict. Some there be who are developed
by sympathy, but Henri IV was developed by opposition,
and thus it was that although opposed in the
matter by his Prime Minister, Sully, he established factories
for the weaving of tapestries in both high and low
warps.

With the desire to see the arts of peace instead of evidences
of war throughout his kingdom just rescued from
conflict, he took all means to set his people in the ways
of pleasing industry. The indefatigable Sully was
plucking the royal sleeve to follow the path of the plough,
to see man’s salvation, material and moral, in the ways
of agriculture. But Henri favoured townspeople as
[Pg 95]
well as country people, and with the Edict of Nantes,
releasing from the bondage of terror a large number of
workers, he showed much industry in encouraging tapestry
factories in and near Paris, and as these all lead to
Gobelins we will consider them.

See larger image

TRIUMPH OF THE GODS (DETAIL)

Gobelins, Seventeenth Century

See larger image

TRIUMPH OF THE GODS (DETAIL)

Gobelins Tapestry

Henri IV, notwithstanding his Prime Minister Sully’s
opposition to what he considered a favouring of vicious
luxury, began to occupy himself in tapestry factories as
early in his reign as his people could rise from the
wounds of war. Taking his movements chronologically
we will begin with his establishment in 1597 (eight years
after this first Bourbon took the throne) of a high-warp
industry in the house of the Jesuits in the Faubourg St.
Antoine, associating here Du Bourg of La Trinité and
Laurent, equally renowned, and the composer of the St.
Merri tapestries.[14]

Flemish workers in Paris were at this same time, about
1601, encouraged by the king and under protection of
his steward. These Flemings were the nucleus of a great
industry, for it was over them that two famous masters
governed, namely, François de la Planche and Marc Comans
or Coomans. In 1607 Henri IV established the
looms which these men were called upon to direct.

These two Flemings, great in their art, were men of
family and of some means, for their first venture in the
manufacture of tapestry was a private enterprise like any
of to-day. They looked to themselves to produce the
money for the support of the industry. Combining
[Pg 96]
qualities of both the artist and the business man, they
took on apprentices and also established looms in the
provinces (notably Tours and Amiens) where commercialism
was as prominent as in modern methods; that is
to say, that by turning off a lot of cheaper work for
smaller purses, a quick and ready market was found
which supplied the money necessary for the production
of those finer works of art which are left to delight us
to-day.

This manner of procedure of De la Planche and Comans
has an interest far deeper than the mere financial
venture of the men of the early Seventeenth Century, because
it forces upon us the fact that at that time, and
earlier, no state ateliers existed. It was Henri IV who
first saw the wisdom of using the public purse in advancing
this industry. He established Du Bourg in the
Louvre. With Henri Laurent he was placed in the
Tuileries, in 1607, and that atelier lasted until the ministry
of Colbert in the reign of Louis XIV.

In about 1627 the great De la Planche died and his
son, Raphael, established ateliers of his own in the Faubourg
St. Germain, turning out from his looms productions
which were of sufficient excellence to be confused
with those of his father’s most profitable factory.
Chronologically this fact belongs later, so we return to
the influence of Henri IV and the master gentleman
tapissiers, De la Planche and Comans.

The very name of the old palace, Les Tournelles, calls
up a crowd of pictures: the death of Henri II at the
tournament in honour of the marriage of his son with
[Pg 97]
Marie Stuart, the subsequent razing of this ancient home
of kings by Catherine de Medici, and its reconstruction
in its present form by Henri IV. It is here that Richelieu
honoured the brief reign of Louis XIII by a statue,
and it is here that Madame de Sevigné was born. But
more to our purpose, it was here that, in 1607, Henri IV
cast his kingly eye when establishing a certain tapestry
factory. It was here he placed as directors the celebrated
Comans and De la Planche. It happened in time,
that the looms of Les Tournelles were moved to the
Faubourg St. Marceau and these two men came in
time to direct these and all other looms under royal
patronage.

Examples are not wanting in museums of French work
of this time, showing the development of the art and the
progress that France was making under Henri IV, whose
energy without limit, and whose interests without number,
would to-day have given him the epithet of strenuous.

Under his reign we see the activity that so easily led
France up to the point where all that was needed was
the assembling of the factories under the direction of one
great master. The factories flourishing under Henri IV
were La Trinité, the Louvre, the Savonnerie, the Faubourg
St. Marceau and one in the Tuileries. But it
needed the power of Louis XIV to tie all together in the
strength of unity.

The assassin Ravaillac, fanatically muttering through
the streets of Paris, alternately hiding and swaggering
throughout the loveliest month of May, when he thrust
his murderous dagger through the royal coach, not only
[Pg 98]
gave a death blow to Henri IV, but to many of these
industries that the king had cherished for his people
against the opposition of his prime minister. The tale of
tapestry is like a vine hanging on a frame of history, and
frequent allusion therefore must be made to the tales of
kings and their ministers.

As it is not always a monarch, but often the power
behind the throne that rules, we see the force of Richelieu
surging behind the reign of the suppressed Louis
XIII, whose rule followed that of the regretted Henri
IV. The master of the then new Palais-Royal had
minor interests of his own, apart from his generous plots
of ruin for the Protestants, for all the French nobility,
and for the House of Austria to which the queen belonged.
Luxurious surroundings were a necessity to this
man, refined in the arts of cruelty and of living. It was
no wonder that under him tapestry weaving was not allowed
to die, but was fostered until that day when the
Grand Monarch would organise and perfect.

In 1643, Louis XIV came to the throne under the guidance
of Anne of Austria, but it was many years before
he was able to make his influence appreciable. Meanwhile,
however, others were fostering the elegant industry.
It was as early as 1647 that two celebrated tapestry
weavers came to Paris from Italy. They were Pierre
Lefèvre or Lefebvre and his son Jean. The first of these
was the chief of a factory in Florence, whither he presently
returned. Jean Lefebvre stayed in Paris, won his
way all the better for being released from parental rule,
and in time received the great honour of being appointed
[Pg 99]
one of the directors of the Gobelins, when that factory
was finally organised as an institution of the state.

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GOBELINS BORDER (DETAIL) SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

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CHILDREN GARDENING

After Charles Lebrun. Gobelins, Seventeenth Century. Château Henri
Quatre, Pau

During the regency of Louis XIV there were also factories
outside of Paris. The high-warp looms of Tours
were of such notable importance that the great Richelieu
placed here an order for tapestries of great splendour
with which to soften his hours of ease. Rheims Cathedral
still harbours the fine hangings which were woven
for the place they now adorn, an unusual circumstance in
the world of tapestry. These hangings (The Story of
Christ) were woven at Rheims, where the factory existed
well known throughout the first half of the Seventeenth
Century. The church had previously ordered tapestries
from another town executed by one Daniel Pepersack,
and so highly approved was his work that he was made
director of the Rheims factory.[15]

A factory which lasted but a few years, yet has for us
a special interest, is that of Maincy, founded in 1658.
It is here that we hear of the great Colbert and of Lebrun,
whose names are synonymous with prosperity of
the Gobelins. For the factory at Maincy, Lebrun made
cartoons of great beauty, notably that of The Hunt of
Meleager, which now hangs in the Gobelins Museum
in Paris. Louis Blamard was the director of the workmen,
who were Flemish, and who were afterwards called
to Paris to operate the looms of the newly-formed Gobelins,
and the reason of the transference forms a part of
the history of the great people of that day.

Richelieu in dying had passed over his power to
[Pg 100]
Mazarin, who had used it with every cruelty possible to the
day. He had coveted riches and elegance and had possessed
himself of them; had collected in his palace the
most beautiful works of art of his day or those of a previous
time. After Mazarin came Foucquet, the great, the
iconoclastic, the unfortunate.

It was at Foucquet’s estate of Vaux near Maincy that
this tapestry factory of short duration was established and
soon destroyed. The powerful Superintendent of Finance,
with his eye for the beautiful and desire for the
luxury of kings, built for himself such a château as only
the magnificence of that time produced. It was situated
far enough from Paris to escape any sort of ennui, and
was surrounded by gardens most marvellous, within a
beauteous park. It lay, when finished, like a jewel on
the fair bosom of France. The great superintendent
conceived the idea of pleasing the young king, Louis XIV,
by inviting the court for a wondrous fête in its lovely
enclosure.

Foucquet was a man of the world, and of the court,
knew how to please man’s lighter side, and how to use
social position for his own ends. France calls him a
“dilapidateur,” but when his power and incidentally the
revenues of state, were laid out to produce a day of pleasure
for king and court, his taste and ability showed such
a fête as could scarce be surpassed even in those days of
artistic fêtes champêtres.

The great gardens were brought into use in all the
beauty of flower and vine, of lawn and bosquet, of terrace
and fountain. When the guests arrived, weary of town
[Pg 101]
life, they were turned loose in the enchanting place like
birds uncaged, and to the beauty of Nature was added
that of folk as gaily dressed as the flowers. The king
was invited to inspect it all for his pleasure, asked to
feast in the gardens, and to repose in the splendid château.

He was young then, in the early twenties, and luxury
was younger then than now, so he was pleased to spend
the time in almost childish enjoyments. A play al fresco
was almost a necessity to a royal garden party, which was
no affair of an hour like ours in the busy to-day, but extended
the livelong day and evening. Molière was ready
with his sparkling satires at the king’s caprice, and into
the garden danced the players before an audience to whom
vaudeville and café chantant were exclusively a royal
novelty arranged for their delectation.

It is easy to see the elegant young king and his court
in the setting of a sophisticated out-of-doors, wandering
on grassy paths, lingering under arches of roses, plucking
a flower to nest beside a smiling face, stopping where
servants—obsequious adepts, they were then—supplied
dainty things to eat and drink. Madame de Sevigné was
there, she of the observant eye, an eye much occupied at
this time with the figure of Superintendent Foucquet, the
host of this glorious occasion. This gracious lady lacked
none of the appearance of frivolity, coiffed in curls,
draped in lace and soft silks, but her mind was deeply
occupied with the signs of the times. All the elegance
of the château, all the seductive beauty of terrace, garden,
and bosquet, all the piquant surprises of play and pyrotechnics,
what were they? Simply the disinterested
[Pg 102]
effort of a subject to give pleasure to His Majesty, the
King.

There were those present who had long envied
Foucquet, with his ever-increasing power and wealth, his
ability to patronise the arts, to collect, and even to establish
his tapestry looms like a king, for his own palace and
for gifts. This grand fête in the lovely month of June
did more than shower pleasure, more than gratify the lust
of the eye. In effect, it was a gathering of exquisite
beauties and charming men, lost in light-hearted play; in
reality, it proved to be an incitive to envy and malice, and
a means to ruin.

Among the observant guests at this wondrous fête
champêtre was Colbert, young, ambitious, keen. He
was not slow to see the holes in Foucquet’s fabric, nor
were others. And so, whispers came to the king.
Foucquet’s downfall is the old story of envy, man trying
to climb by ruining his superiors, hating those whose
magnificence approaches their own. Foucquet’s unequalled
entertainment of the king was made to count as
naught. Louis, even before leaving for Paris, had begun
to ask whence came the money that purchased this
wide fertile estate stretching to the vision’s limit, the
money that built the château of regal splendour,
the money that paid for the prodigal pleasures of that
day of delights? Foucquet thought to have gained the
confidence and admiration of the king. But, on leaving,
Louis said coldly, “We shall scarce dare ask you to our
poor palace, seeing the superior luxury to which you are
accustomed.” A fearful cut, but only a straw to the fate
[Pg 103]
which followed, the investigations into the affairs of
Superintendent Foucquet. His arrest and his conviction
followed and then the eighteen dreary years of imprisonment
terminating only with the superintendent’s life.
Madame de Sevigné saw him in the beginning, wept for
her hero, but after a while she, too, fell away from his
weary years.

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CHILDREN GARDENING

After Charles Lebrun. Gobelins, Seventeenth Century. Château Henri
Quatre, Pau

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GOBELINS GROTESQUE

Musée des Arts Decoratifs, Paris

With his arrest came the end of the glories of the
Château of Vaux near Maincy, and so, too, came an end
to the factory where so fine results had been obtained in
tapestry weaving. Yet the effort was not in vain, for
some of the tapestries remain and the factory was the
school where certain celebrated men were trained.

It may easily have been that Louis XIV discovered on
that day at Vaux the excellence of Lebrun whom he
made director at the Gobelins in Paris when they were
but newly formed. Foucquet, wasting in prison, had
many hours in which to think on this and on the advancement
of the very man who had been keenest in running
him to cover, the great Colbert. It was well for France,
it was well for the artistic industry whose history occupies
our attention, that these things happened; but we,
nevertheless, feel a weakness towards the man of genius
and energy caged and fretted by prison bars, for he had
shown initiative and daring, qualities of which the world
has ever need.

Foucquet’s factory lasted three years. It was directed
by Louis Blamard or Blammaert of Oudenarde, and employed
a weaver named Jean Zègre, who came from the
works at Enghien, works sufficiently known to be
[Pg 104]
remarked. Lebrun composed here and fell under the
influence of Rubens, an influence that pervaded the
grandiose art of the day. The earliest works of Lebrun,
three pieces, were later used to complete a set of Rubens’
History of Constantine. The Muses was a set by Lebrun,
also composed for the Château of Vaux. The
charm of this set is a matter for admiration even now
when, alas, all is destroyed but a few fragments.

The disgrace of Foucquet was the last determining
cause of the establishment of the Gobelins factory under
Louis XIV, an act which after this brief review of Paris
factories (and an allusion to sporadic cases outside of
Paris) we are in position at last to consider. Pursuit of
knowledge in regard to the Gobelins factory leads us
through ways the most flowery and ways the most stormy,
through sunshine and through the dark, right up to our
own times.

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GOBELINS TAPESTRY, AFTER LEBRUN, EPOCH LOUIS XIV

Collection of Wm. Baumgarten, Esq., New York

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THE VILLAGE FÊTE

Gobelins Tapestry after Teniers

[Pg 105]

CHAPTER X

THE GOBELINS FACTORY, 1662

COLBERT saw the wisdom of taking direction
for the king, Louis XIV, of the looms of Foucquet’s
château. Travel being difficult enough
to make desirable the concentration of points of interest,
Colbert transferred the looms of Vaux to Paris. To do
this he had first to find a habitat, and what so suitable
as the Hotel des Gobelins, a collection of buildings on
the edge of Paris by which ran a little brook called
the Bièvre. The Sieur Leleu was then the owner, and
the sale of the buildings was made on June 6, 1662.

This was the beginning only of the purchase, for Louis
XIV added adjoining houses for the various uses of the
large industries he had in mind, for the development of
arts and crafts of all sorts, and for the lodging of the
workers.

The story of the original occupants of the premises is
almost too well known to recount. The simple tale of
the conscientious “dyers in scarlet” is told on the marble
plaque at the present entry into the collection of buildings
still standing, still open to visitors. It is a tale with
a moral, an obvious simple moral with no need of Alice’s
Duchess to point it out, and it smacks strong of the honesty
of a labour to which we owe so much.

Late in the Fifteenth Century the brothers Gobelin
[Pg 106]
came to the city of Paris to follow their trade, which
was dyeing, and their ambition, which was to produce
a scarlet dye like that they had seen flaunting in the glowing
city of Venice. The trick of the trade in those days
was to find a water of such quality that dyes took to it
kindly. The tiny river, or rather brook, called the
Bièvre, which ran softly down towards the Seine had the
required qualities, and by its murmuring descent, Jean
and Philibert pitched the tents of their fortune.

They succeeded, too, so well that we hear of their descendants
in later centuries as having become gentlemen,
not of property only, but of cultivation, and far removed
from trades or bartering. Their name is ever famous,
for it tells not only the story of the two original dyers,
but of their subsequent efforts in weaving, and finally it
has come to mean the finest modern product of the hand
loom. Just as Arras gave the name to tapestry in the
Fourteenth Century, so the Gobelins has given it to the
time of Louis XIV, even down to our own day—more
especially in Europe, where the word tapestry is far less
used than here.

The tablet now at the Gobelins—let us re-read it, for
in some hasty visit to the Latin Quarter we may have overlooked
it. Translated freely it reads, “Jean and Philibert
Gobelin, merchant dyers in scarlet, who have left their
name to this quarter of Paris and to the manufacture of
tapestries, had here their atelier, on the banks of the
Bièvre, at the end of the Fifteenth Century.”

Another inscription takes a great leap in time, skips
over the centuries when France was not in the lead in this
[Pg 107]
art, and recommences with the awakening strength under
the wise care of Henri IV. It reads:

“April 1601. Marc Comans and François de la
Planche, Flemish tapestry weavers, installed their ateliers
on the banks of the Bièvre.”

“September 1667, Colbert established in the buildings
of the Gobelins the manufacture of the furniture
(meubles) of the Crown, under the direction of Charles
Lebrun.”

The tablet omits the date that is fixed in our mind as
that of the beginning of the modern tapestry industry in
France, the year 1662, but that is only because it deals
with a date of more general importance, the time when
the Gobelins was made a manufactory of all sorts of
gracious products for the luxury of palaces and châteaux,
not tapestries alone, but superb furniture, and metal work,
inlay, mounting of porcelains and all that goes to furnish
the home of fortunate men.

In that year of 1667 was instituted the ateliers supported
by the state, not dependent upon the commercialism
of the workers. This made possible the development
of such men as Boulle with his superb furniture, of Riesner
with his marquetry, of Caffieri with his marvels in
metal to decorate all meubles, even vases, which were then
coming from China in their beauty of solid glaze or
eccentric ornament.

Here lies the great secret of the success of Louis XIV
in these matters, with the coffers of the Crown he rewarded
the artists above the necessity of mere living, and
freed each one for the best expression of his own especial
[Pg 108]
art. The day of individual financial venture was gone.
The tapestry masters of other times had both to work
and to worry. They had to be artists and at the same time
commercial men, a chimerical combination.

The expense of maintaining a tapestry factory was an
incalculable burden. A man could not set up a loom,
a single one, as an artist sets up an easel, and in solitude
produce his woven work of art. Other matters go to the
making of a tapestry than weaving, matters which have
to do with cartoons for the design, dyes, wools, threads,
etc.; so that many hands must be employed, and these
must all be paid. The apprentice system helped much,
but even so, the master of the atelier was responsible for
his finances and must look for a market for his goods.

What a relief it was when the king took all this responsibility
from the shoulders and said to the artists and
artisans, “Art for Art’s sake,” or whatever was the equivalent
shibboleth of that day. Here was comfort assured
for the worker, with a housing in the Gobelins, or in that
big asylum, the Louvre, where an apartment was the
reward of virtue. And now was a market assured for a
man’s work, a royal market, with the king as its chief,
and his favourites following close.

The ateliers scattered about Paris were allied in spirit,
were all the result of the encouragement of preceding
monarchs, but it remained for Le Grand Monarque to
gather all together and form a state solidarity.

Kings must have credit, even though others do the
work. It was the labour of the able Colbert to organise
this factory. He was in favour then. It was after his
[Pg 109]
acuteness had helped in deposing the splendid brigand
Foucquet, and his power was serving France well, so well
that he brought about his head the inevitable jealousy
which finally threw him, too, into unmerited disgrace.

Colbert, then, although a Minister of State, head of
the Army of France, and a few other things, had the fate
of the Gobelins in his hand. As the ablest is he who
chooses best his aids, Colbert looked among his countrymen
for the proper director of the newly-organised institution.
He selected Charles Lebrun.

The very name seems enough, in itself. It is the concrete
expression of ability, not only as an artist, but as
a leader of artists, a director, an assembler, a blender.
He called to the Gobelins, as addition to those already
there, the apprentices from La Trinité, the weavers from
the Faubourg St. Germain, and from the Louvre. He
established three ateliers of high-warp under Jean Jans,
Jean Lefebvre and Henri Laurent; also two ateliers of
low-warp under Jean Delacroix and Jean-Baptiste
Mozin. When charged with the decoration of Versailles
he had under his direction fifty artists of differing
scopes, which alone would show his power of assembling
and leading, of blending and ordering. Workers at the
Gobelins numbered as many as two hundred fifty, and
apprentices were legion.

Ten or twelve important artists composed the designs
for tapestries, yet the mind of Lebrun is seen to dominate
all; his genius was their inspiration. It was he whose
influence pervaded the decorative art of the day. More
than any others in that grand age he influenced the tone
[Pg 110]
of the artistic work. We may say it was the king, we
may have styles named for the king, but it was Lebrun
who made them what they were. The spirit of the time
was there, monarch and man made that, but it was Lebrun
who had the talent to express it in art. It was a
time when France was fully awake, more fully awake
than Italy who had, in fact, commenced the somnolence
of her art; she was strong with that brutal force that is
recently up from savagery, and she took her grandeur
seriously.

At least that was the attitude of the king. No lightness,
no effervescing cynical humour ever disturbed the
heavy splendour of his pose. And this grand pose of
the king, Lebrun expressed in the heavy sumptuousness
of decoration. The tapestries of that time show the mood
of the day in subject, in border and in colour. All is
superb, grandiose.

Rubens, although not of France, dominated Europe
with his magnificence of style, a style suited to the time,
expressing force rather than refinement, yet with a splendid
decorative value in the art we are considering.
Flanders looked to him for inspiration, and his lead was
everywhere followed. His virile work had power to
inspire, to transmit enthusiasm to others, and thus he was
responsible for much of the improvement in decorative
art, the re-establishment of that art upon an intellectual
basis. Designs from his hands were full, splendid and
self-assertive; harmony and proportion were there. A
study of the Antony and Cleopatra series and of the plates
given in this volume will establish and verify this.

See larger image

DESIGN BY RUBENS

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DESIGN BY RUBENS

[Pg 111]
Lebrun’s century was the same as that of Rubens, but
the former had the fine feeling for art of the Latin, who
knows that its first province is to please. A comparison
between the two men must not be carried too far, for
Rubens was essentially a painter, attacking the field of
decoration only with the overflow of imagination, while
Lebrun’s life and talent were wholly directed in the way
of beautifying palaces and châteaux. Yet Rubens’ work
gave a fresh impulse to tapestry weaving in Brussels
while Lebrun was inspiring it in France.

Lebrun had, then, to direct the talent and the labour
of an army of artists and artisans, and to keep them working
in harmony. It was no mean task, for one artist alone
was not left to compose an entire picture, but each was
taken for his specialty. One artist drew the figures, another
the animals, another the trees, and another the architecture;
but it was the director, Lebrun, who composed
and harmonised the whole. Thus, although the number
of tapestries actually composed by him is few, it was his
great mind that ordered the work of others. He was the
leader of the orchestra, the others were the instruments
he controlled.

It was while at Vaux that Lebrun had more time for
his own composition. He there produced a series called
Les Renommés, masterpieces of pure decorative composition.
These were designed as portières for the Château
of Maincy. They came to be models for the Gobelins,
and were woven to hang at royal doors, the doors of
Foucquet being at this time dressed with iron bars.

The Gobelins wove seventy-two sets after this beautiful
[Pg 112]
model which had made Lebrun’s début as an artist.
Foucquet had given him a more pretentious work; it was
to complete a suite, the History of Constantine, after
Raphael. Rubens had given a fresh flush of popularity
to this subject, which again became the mode. The History
of Meleager was begun at Vaux and finished at the
Gobelins. Later, Vaux forgotten, or at least a thing of
the past, Lebrun’s decorative genius found expression in
the series called The Months or The Royal Residences,
of which there were twelve hangings.

In these last the scheme is the perfection of decoration,
with the subject well subdued, yet so subtly placed that
notwithstanding its modesty, the eye promptly seeks it.
The castle in the distance, the motive holding aloft the
sign of the Zodiac, are seen even before the splendid columns
and the foliage of the middle-ground.

Such a hanging has power to play pretty tricks with
the imagination of him who gazes upon it. The columns,
smooth and solid, declare him at once to be in a
place of luxury. Beyond the foreground’s columns, but
near enough for touching, are trees to make a pleasant
shade, and beyond, in the far distance, is the château set
in fair gardens, even the château where the lovely Louise
de la Vallière held her court until conscience drove her
to the convent.

The set of most renown, woven under Lebrun’s generalship,
was that splendid advertisement of the king’s
magnificence known as the History of the King. Louis
demanded above all else that he should appear splendidly
before men. He was jealous of the magnificence of all
[Pg 113]
kings and emperors, whether living or dead. Even Solomon’s
glory was not to typify greater than his. With
this end in view, pomp was his pleasure, ceremony was
his gratification. Add to these an insatiable vanity that
knows not the disintegrating assaults of a sense of humour,
and we have a man to be fed on profound adulation.

See larger image

DESIGN BY RUBENS

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GOBELINS TAPESTRY. DESIGN BY RUBENS

Royal Collection, Madrid

The subjects for the History of the King were chosen
from official solemnities during the first twelve years of
his reign. Lebrun’s task, into which he threw his whole
soul, was to celebrate the power and the glory of his
master, to show the king in perpetual picture as the greatest
living personage, and to still his fears with regard to
long defunct royal rivals. His life as a man was pictured,
his marriage, his treaties with other nations, and
his actions as a soldier in the various battles or military
conquests. In the latter affairs he had not even been
present, but poet’s license was given where the glorification
of the king was concerned. The flattery that surrounds
a king thus gave him reason to think that his
persecutions in the Palatinate and his constant warfare
were greatly to his glory.

It is the tapestry in this set that is called Visit of
Louis XIV to the Gobelins that interests us strongly,
as being delightfully pertinent to our subject. The picture
shows the king in chary indulgence standing just
within the court of the Royal Factory, while eager masters
of arts and crafts strenuously heap before him their
masterpieces. (Plate facing page 114.)

The borders of these sumptuous hangings are to be
enjoyed when the original set can be seen, for the borders
[Pg 114]
are Lebrun’s special care. The three pieces added late
in the reign are drawn with different borders, and no
stronger example of deteriorating change can be given,
the change in the composition of the border which took
place after the passing of Lebrun. The pieces in the
set of the Life of the King numbered forty; with the addition
of the later ones, forty-three. They were repeated
many times in the succeeding years, but on low-warp,
reduced in size, and without the superb decorative border
which was composed by Lebrun’s own hand for the
original series.

François de la Meulen was Lebrun’s able coadjutor
in the direction of this famous set. Eight artists accustomed
to the work were charged with the cartoons, but
Lebrun headed it all. It is interesting to note that the
temptation to sport in the fields of pure decoration, led
him into the personal composition of the border. These
borders are the very acme of perfection in decoration,
full of strength, of grace, and of purity. They suggest
the classic, yet are full of the warm blood of the hour;
they are Greek, yet they are French, and they foreshadow
the centuries of beautiful design which France supplies
to the world.

The colouring of these tapestries seems to us strong,
but it is not a strength of tone that offends, rather it adds
force to the subject. The charge is made that in this
suite the deplorable change had taken place which lifted
tapestries from their original intent and made of them
paintings in wool. That change certainly did come later,
as we shall see and deplore, but at present the colours
[Pg 115]
kept comparatively low in number. The proof of this
was that only seventy-nine tones were discoverable when
the Gobelins factory in recent years examined this hanging
for the purposes of reproducing it.

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LOUIS XIV VISITING THE GOBELINS FACTORY

Gobelins Tapestry, Epoch Louis XIV

Lebrun’s task in this series seems to us far more simple
in point of picturesqueness than it did to him, for the
affairs of the time were those depicted. They were the
events of the moment, and the personages taking part in
them were given in recognisable portraiture. Figure a
tapestry of to-day depicting the laying of a cornerstone
by our National President, every one in modern dress,
every face a portrait, and Lebrun’s task appears in a
new light. Yet he was able to accomplish it in a way
which gratified the overfed vanity of Louis and which
more than gratifies the art lover of to-day.

The set called the History of Alexander is one of Lebrun’s
famous works. In subject it departs from the
affairs of the time of the Sun King, to portray the Greek
Conqueror, to whom Louis liked to be compared. For
us the classic dress is less piquant than the gorgeous
toilettes of France in the Seventeenth Century, and the
battle of the Granicus is less engaging than scenes from
the life of Louis XIV. But this is a famous set, and
paintings of the same may be found in the Louvre.

Originally the tapestries were but five, but the larger
ones having been divided into three each, the number is
increased. The Gobelins factory wove several sets, and,
the model becoming popular, it was copied many times
in Brussels and elsewhere, often with distressing alterations
in drawing, in border, and in colour.

[Pg 116]
There were other suites produced at the Gobelins at
this wonderful time of co-operation between Colbert, the
minister, and Lebrun, the artist. Colbert, in his wisdom
of state economy, had repaired the ravages of the previous
ministry, and had the coffers full for the government’s
necessities and the king’s indulgences. Well for the liberal
arts, that he counted these among the matters to be
fostered in this wonderful time, which rises like a mountain
ridge between feudal savagery and modern civilisation.

But Colbert, powerful as was his position, had yet to
suffer by reason of the despotism of the absolute monarch
who ruled every one within borders of bleeding France.
Louis began, before youth had left him, the terrible persecution
of the people in the name of religion, and established
also an indulgent left-hand court. The prodigious
expenditures for these were bound to be liquidated by
Colbert. Faithful to his master, he produced the money.

The charm of royalty surrounded Louis, he was idealised
by a people proud of his position as the most magnificent
monarch of Europe; but Colbert was denounced
as a tax collector and a persecutor, yet suffered in silence,
if he might protect his king. Before he died, Louvois
had undermined his credit even with the king, and his
funeral at night, to avoid a mob, was a pathetic fact.
France has now reinstated him, say modern men—but
that is the irony of fate.

[Pg 117]

CHAPTER XI

THE GOBELINS FACTORY (Continued)

COLBERT died most inopportunely in 1684 and
was succeeded by his enemy, and for that matter,
the enemy of France, the man of jealousy and
cruelty, Louvois. He had long hated Colbert for his
success, counting as an affront to himself Colbert’s marvellous
establishment of a navy which he felt rivalled in
importance the army, over which the direction was his
own.

On finding Colbert’s baton in his hand, it was but
human to strike with it as much as to direct, and one
of his blows fell upon the head of the Gobelins, Lebrun.
Thus history is woven into tapestry. Lebrun was not
at once deposed; first his magnificent wings were clipped,
so that his flights into artistic originality were curtailed.
This petty persecution had a benumbing effect. New
models were not encouraged. Strangely enough, the
scenes that glorified the king were no longer reproduced,
nor those of antique kings like Alexander, whose greatness
Louis was supposed to rival.

It is not possible to tell the story of tapestry without
telling the story of the times, for the lesser acts are but
the result of the greater. There are matters in the life
of Louis XIV that are inseparable from our account.
These are the associating of his life with that of the three
[Pg 118]
women whom he exalted far higher than his queen, Marie
Thérèse, the well-known, much-vaunted mesdames, de la
Vallière, de Montespan and de Maintenon.

Even before the death of Colbert, Louvois, with his
army, had encouraged the religious persecutions and wars
of the king, and shortly after, the widow of the poet
Scarron became the royal spouse. Relentless, indeed,
were the persecutions then. It was in the same year of
the marriage that Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes,
through the hand of the weak Le Tellier, an action which
gave Louvois ample excuse for depleting the state coffers.
Making military expense an excuse, he turned his blighting
hand toward the Gobelins and restricted the director,
Lebrun, even to denying him the golden threads so necessary
for the production of the sumptuous tapestries.

And so for a time the productions of the looms lacked
their accustomed elegance. Under Madame de Maintenon,
the spirit of a morose religion pervaded the court.
All France was suffering under it, and in its name unbelievable
horrors were perpetrated in every province.
Paris was not too well informed of these to interfere with
bourgeois life, but at court the hypocritical soul of
Madame de Maintenon made self-righteousness a virtue.

An almost laughable result of this pious rectitude was
a certain order given at the Gobelins. Madame de Maintenon
had thrust her leading nose between the doors of the
factory and had scented outraged modesty in the reproduction
there of the tapestries woven from models of
Raphael, Giulio Romano and the classicists, cartoons in
great favour after the hampering of Lebrun’s imagination.
[Pg 119]
The naked gods from Olympus must be clothed,
said this pious and modest lady.

This was very well for her rôle, as her influence over
the king lay deep-rooted in her pose of heavy virtue;
but at the Gobelins, the tapestry-makers must have
laughed long and loud at the prudery which they were
set to further by actually weaving pictured garments and
setting them into the hangings where the lithe limbs of
Apollo, and Venus’ lovely curves, had been cut away.
The hanging called The Judgment of Paris is one of those
altered to suit the refinement of the times.

Louvois’ dominance lasted as long as Lebrun, so the
genius of the latter never reasserted itself in the factory.
Two methods of supply for designs came in vogue, and
mark the time. One was to turn to the old masters of
Italy’s high Renaissance for drawings. This brought
a quantity of drawings of fables and myths into use, so
that palace walls were decorated with Greek gods instead
of modern ones. Raphael, as a master in decoration, was
carefully copied, also other men of his school. The second
source of cartoons was chosen by Louvois, who
searched among previous works for the most celebrated
tapestries and had them copied without change.

Thus came the Gobelins to reproduce hangings that
had not originated in their ateliers. All this traces the
change that came from the clipping of Lebrun’s wings
of genius. Identification marks they are, when old
tapestries come our way.

Pierre Mignard succeeded Lebrun as director of the
Gobelins after the death of the greatest genius of decoration
[Pg 120]
in modern times. Lebrun had seen such prosperity
of tapestry weaving that eight hundred workers had
scarcely been enough to supply the tapestries ordered.
When Mignard came for his five years of direction, things
had mightily changed, and he did nothing to revive or
encourage the work. He owed his appointment entirely
to Louvois, whose protégé he had long been. The same
year, 1691, saw the death of them both.

Until 1688 the factory was at its best time of productiveness,
reaching the perfection of modern drawing in
its cartoons, and, in its weaving, equalling the manner of
Brussels in the early Sixteenth Century.

From then on began the decline, for the reasons so
forcibly written on pages of history. The French king’s
ambition to conquer, his animosity—jealousy, if you
will—toward Holland, his unceasing conflict with England,
added to his fierce attacks on religionists, especially
in the Palatinate—all these things required the most stupendous
expenditures. The Mississippi was now discovered,
the English colonists were in conflict with the
French, here in America, and the New World was becoming
too desirable a possession for Louis to be willing
to cede his share without a struggle; and thus came the
expense of fighting the English in that far land which
was at least thirty days’ sail away.

Perhaps Mignard worked against odds too great for
even a strong director. Such drains on the state treasury
as were made by the self-indulgent court, and by the
political necessities, demanded not only depriving the
Gobelins of proper expensive materials, but in the
[Pg 121]
department of furniture and ornaments, demanded also the
establishment of a sinister melting pot, a hungry mouth
that devoured the precious metals already made more
precious by the artistic hands of the gold-working artists.

Mignard’s futile work was finished by his demise in
1695. Such was then the pitiable conditions at the
Gobelins that it was not considered worth while to fill
his place. Thus ended the first period of that beautiful
conception, art sustained by the state, artists relieved
from all care except that of expressing beauty.

The ateliers were closed; the weavers had to seek other
means of gaining their living. The busy Gobelins, a
very Paradise of workers, an establishment which felt
itself the pride of Paris and the pet of the king, full of
merry apprentices and able masters, this happy solidarity
fell under neglect. The courtyards were lonely; the
Bièvre rippled by unused; the buildings were silent and
deserted. Some of the workers were happy enough to
be taken in at Beauvais, some returned to Flanders, but
many were at the miserable necessity of dropping their
loved professions and of joining the royal troops, for
which the relentless ambition of the king had such large
and terrible use.

The time when the factory remained inactive were the
dolorous years from 1694 to 1697. It was in the latter
year that peace was signed in the Holland town of Ryswick,
which ended at least one of Louis’ bloody oppressions,
the fierce attacks in the Palatinate.

The place of Colbert was never filled, so far as the
Gobelins was concerned. Louvois had not its interests
[Pg 122]
in his hard hands, nor had his immediate followers in
state administrations up to 1708, which included Mansard
(of the roofs) and the flippity courtesan, the Duc d’Antin.
But power was later given to Jules Robert de Cotte
to raise the fallen Gobelins by his own wise direction,
assisted by his father’s political co-operation (1699-1735).
Once again can we smile in thinking of the factory
where the wares of beauty were produced. Of
course, the artists flocked to the centre, eager to express
themselves. The one most interesting to us was Claude
Audran. Others there were who contributed adorable
designs and helped build up the most exquisite expressions
of modern art, but, alas, their modesty was such that
their names are scarce known in connexion with the art
they vivified.

The aged Louis was ending his forceful reign in increasing
weakness, deserted at the finish by all but the
rigid de Maintenon; and four-year-old Louis, the grandson
of the Grand Dauphin, was succeeding under the
direction of the Regent of Orleans. New monarchs, new
styles, the rule was; for the newly-crowned must have his
waves of flattery curling about the foot of the throne.
Louis XIV, the Grand Monarque, lived to his pose of
heavy magnificence even in the furnishing and decorating
of the apartments where he ruled as king and where he
lived as man. Sumptuous splendour, expressed in heavy
design, in deep colouring, with much red and gold, these
were the order of the day, and best expressed the reign.

But with Philip as regent, and the young king but a
baby, a gayer mood must creep into the articles of beauty
[Pg 123]
with which man self-indulgently decorates his surroundings.
Pomp of a heavy sort had no place in the regent’s
heart. He saw life lightly, and liked to foster the belief
that a man might make of it a pretty play.

Thus, given so good excuse for a new school of decoration,
Claude Audran snatched up his talented brush
and put down his dainty inspirations with unfaltering
delicacy of touch. He wrote upon his canvas poems in
life, symphonies in colour, created a whole world of tasteful
fancy, a world whose entire intent was to please. He
left the heavy ways of pomp and revelled in a world
where roses bloom and ribbons flutter, where clouds are
strong to support the svelte deity upon them, and where
the rudest architecture is but an airy trellis.

The classic, the Greek, he never forgot. It was ever
his inspiration, his alphabet with which he wrote the
spirit of his composition, but it was a classic thought
played upon with the most talented of variations. Pure
Greek was too cold and chaste for the temper of the time
in which he lived and worked and of which he was the
creature; and so his classic foundation was graced with
curves, with colour, with artful abandon, and all the
charming fripperies of one of the most exquisite periods
of decoration. Gods and goddesses were a necessary part
of such compositions, and a continual playing among
amorini, but such deities lived not upon Olympus, nor
anywhere outside France of the Eighteenth Century.
The heavy human forms made popular by the inflation
of the Seventeenth Century were banished to some dark
haven reserved for by-gone modes, and these new gods
[Pg 124]
were exquisite as fairies while voluptuous as courtesans.
They were all caught young and set, while still adolescent
and slender, in suitable niches of delicate surroundings.

The talent of Audran, not content with figures alone,
was lavishly expended on those ingenious decorative designs
which formed the frame and setting of the figures,
the airy world in which they lived and in the borders that
confined the whole.

Only a study of tapestries or their photographs can
show the radical depth of the change from the styles prevailing
under the influence of Madame de Maintenon to
those produced by Audran and his school under the
regence. The difference in character of the two dominations
is the very evident cause. It is as though the
severe moral pose of de Maintenon had suppressed a
whole Pandora’s box of loves and graces who, when the
lid was lifted by the Regent, flew, a happy crew, to fix
themselves in dainty decorative effect, trailing with them
their complement of accessory flowers, butterflies, clouds
and tempered grotesques.

Philippe d’Orleans, under the influence of the corrupt
cleverness of Cardinal du Bois, celebrated the few years
of his regency by bankrupting France with John Law’s
financial fallacies (this was the time of the South Sea
Bubble and the Mississippi scheme) and by returning to
Spain her princess as unsuited for the boy king’s mate—with
war as the natural result of that insult.

But he also let artists have their way, and the style that
they supplied him, shows a talented invention unsurpassed.
Audran we will place at the top, but only to
[Pg 125]
fix a name, for there was a whole army of men composing
the tapestry designs that so delighted the people of those
days and that have gone on thrilling their beholders for
two hundred years, and which distinguish French designs
from all others—which give them that indefinable quality
of grace and softness that we denominate French. Wizards
in design were the artists who developed it and those
who continue it in our own times.

[Pg 126]

CHAPTER XII

THE GOBELINS FACTORY (Continued)

AUDRAN had in his studio André Watteau, whose
very name spells sophisticated pastorals of exceeding
loveliness. Watteau worked with Audran
when he was producing his most inspired set of tapestry,
on which we must dwell for a bit for pure pleasure.
This set is called the Portières des Dieux.

That they were portières, only door-hangings, is a fact
too important to be slipped by. It denotes one of the
greatest changes in tapestries when the size of a hanging
comes down from twenty or thirty feet to the dimensions
of a doorway. It speaks a great change in interiors, and
sets tapestries on a new plane. Later on, they are still
further diminished. But the sadness of noting this
change is routed by the thrills of pleasure given by the
exquisite design, colour and weave.

The Portières of the Gods was, then, a series of eight
small hangings, four typifying the seasons and four the
elements, with an appropriate Olympian forming the
central point of interest and the excuse for an entourage
of thrilling and graceful versatility. This set has been
copied so many times that even the most expert must fail
in trying to identify the date of reproduction. Two hundred
and thirty times this set is known to have been reproduced,
and such talented weavers were given the task as
Jans and Lefebvre.

See larger image

GOBELINS TAPESTRY. TIME OF LOUIS XV

[Pg 127]
In this exquisite period, which might be called the
adolescence of the style Louis XV, Audran and his collaborators
produced another marvellous and inspired set
of portières. These were executed for the Grand
Dauphin, to decorate his room in the château at Meudon,
and were called the Grotesque Months in Bands. The
most self-sufficient of pens would falter at a description
of design so exquisite, which is arranged in three panels
with a deity in each, a composition of extraordinary
grace above and below them, and a bordering band of
losenge or diaper, on which is set the royal double L
and the significant dolphin who gave his name to kings’
sons. The exquisite art of Audran and of the regence
cannot be better seen than in this set of tapestries which
was woven but once at the royal factory, although repeated
many times elsewhere with the border altered,
Audran’s being too personal for other chambers than
that of the prince for whom it was composed. Recently
copies have been made without border.

The name of the artist, Charles Coypel, must not be
overlooked, for it was he who composed the celebrated
suite of Don Quixote. Twenty-eight pieces composed
the series, and they were drawn with that exquisite combination
of romantic scenes and fields of pure decorative
design that characterised the charm of the regence. In
the centre of each piece (small pieces compared to those
of Louis XIV) was a scene like a painting representing
an incident from the adventure of the humorously pathetic
Spanish wanderer; and this was surrounded with
so much of refined decoration as to make it appear but a
[Pg 128]
medallion on the whole surface. This set was so important
as to be repeated many times and occupied the
factory of the Gobelins from 1718 to 1794. Charles
Coypel was but twenty when he composed the first design
for this suite. Each year thereafter he added a new design,
not supplying the last one until 1751. But, while
all honour is due Coypel, Audran and Le Maire and
their collaborators must be remembered as having composed
the borders, the pure decorative work which expresses
the tender style of transition, the suggestive period
of early spring that later matured into the fulsome
Rococo. America is enriched by five of these exquisite
pieces through Mr. Morgan’s recent purchase.

But while artists were producing purity in art, those
in political power were, with ever-increasing effect,
plunging morals into the mud. Philippe, the Regent,
died, the corrupt Duke of Bourbon took the place of minister,
and poor Louis XV was still but thirteen years old,
and unavoidably influenced by the lives of those around
him. Even the Gobelins was under the hand of the
shallow Duke d’Antin. Yet even when the king matured
and became himself a power for corruption, the
artists of the Gobelins reflected only beauty and light.
It is to their credit.

It is an ungrateful task to pick flaws with a period so
firmly enthroned in the affections as that of the regence
and the early years of the reign of Louis XV. The beauties
of its pure decoration lead us into Elysian fields that
are but reluctantly left behind. But the designs and
tapestry weavers of that time left us two distinct classes
[Pg 129]
of production, and to be learned in such matters, the
amateur contemplates both. This second style is ungrateful
because it trains us away from art, delicate and ingenious,
and plants us before enormous woven paintings.

Now it never had been the intention of tapestry to
replace painting. Whenever it leaned that way a deterioration
was evident. It was by the lure of this fallacy
that Brussels lost her pre-eminence. It was through this
that the number of tones was increased from the twenty
or more of Arras to the twenty thousand of the Gobelins.
It was through this that the true mission of tapestry was
lost, which was the mission of supplying a soft, undulating
lining to the habitat of man, and flashes of colour for his
pageants.

Under Louis XIV the pictures came thick and fast, as
we have seen, but in deep-toned, simple colour-scheme.
Now, with the De Cottes as directors at the Gobelins, and
with a new reign begun, more pictures were called for.

The splendid History of the King of Louis XIV
could not be forgotten; the history of his successor must
be similarly represented, and what could this be but a
series of woven paintings. The flower of the time was
an exquisitely complicated decoration on a small scale.
The larger expression was not spontaneous.

Louis XV, poor boy, was not old enough to have had
many events outside the nursery, so it took imagination—perhaps
that of the elegant profligate, Duke d’Antin—to
suggest an occasion of appropriate splendour and significance.
The official reception of the Turkish ambassador
in 1721 was the subject chosen, and under the direction
[Pg 130]
of Charles Parrocel became a superb work, full of court
magnificence of the day and a valuable portrayal to us
of the boyhood of the king.

The same type of big picture was continued in the series
of Hunts of Louis XV, lovely forest scenes wherein
much unsportsmanlike elegance displays itself in the persons
of noble courtiers. The Duc d’Antin favoured
these and they were reproduced until 1745.

It is probable that the Bible fell into neglect in those
days, too heavy a volume for pointed, perfumed fingers
accustomed to no books at all. Bossuet, Voltaire, were
they not obliged to set to the sonorous music of their
voices the reforming and satirical attacks on manners and
morals of the aristocrats at a time when books lay all
unread? But at the Gobelins ateliers the Bible, wiped
clean of dust, was much consulted for inspiration in cartoons.
Charles Coypel dipped into the Old Testament,
and Jouvenet into the New, with the result of several
suites of tapestries of great elegance—all of which might
much better have been painted on canvas and framed.

Charles Coypel, the talented member of a talented family
of painters, also made popular the heroine Armide,
who seemed almost to come of the Bible, since Tasso had
set her in his Christian Jerusalem Delivered. The seductive
palace and entrancing gardens where Renaud
was kept a prisoner, gave opportunity for fine drawing
in this set.

See larger image

HUNTS OF LOUIS XV

Gobelins, G. Audran after Cartoon by Oudry

See larger image

ESTHER AND AHASUERUS SERIES

Gobelins, about 1730. Cartoon by J. F. de Troy; G. Audran, weaver

The Iliad of Homer came in for its share of consideration
at the hands of Antoine and Charles Coypel, who
made of it a set of five scenes. It was Romanelli, the
[Pg 131]
Italian, who painted a similar set, a hundred years before,
for Cardinal Barberini, which set came to America in
the Ffoulke collection. After the death, in 1730, of the
Duke d’Antin, that interesting son of Madame de Montespan,
several directors had the management of the
Gobelins in hand, the Count of Vignory and the Count
of Angivillier being the most important prior to the Revolution.
These were men who held the purse-strings of
the state, and could thereby foster or crush a state institution,
but the direction of the Gobelins itself, as a factory,
was in the hands of architects, beginning with
the able De Cotte. As the factory had many ateliers,
these were each directed by painters, among whom
appear such interesting men of talent as Oudry, Boucher,
Hallé.

Although d’Antin was dead when it commenced, he
is accredited with having inspired and ordered the important
hanging known as the History of Esther. (Plate
facing page 131.) The first piece, from cartoons by Jean
François de Troy, was sent to the weavers in 1737, and the
last piece, which was painted in Rome, was finished in
1742. This set shows as ably as any can, the magnificent
style of production of the period. It had from the beginning
an immense popularity and was copied many
times. Even now it is a favourite subject for those whose
perverted taste leads them into the dubious art of copying
tapestry in paints on cloth.

The serious accusation against this set, which in composition
seems much like the tableaux in grand opera,
is that it invades the art of painting. And that is the
[Pg 132]
fault of woven art at that period. The decline in tapestry
in Paris began when both weavers and painters struggled
for the same results, the weavers quite forgetting
the strength and beauty that were peculiar to their art
alone.

This fault cannot be laid to the weavers only, who numbered
such men as Neilson the able Scot, and Cozette,
who, with wondrous touch, wove the set of Don Quixote;
nor were the artists at fault, for they included
such men as Audran and Boucher. No, it was the
director who blighted and subverted talent, and the vitiated
public taste that shifted restlessly and demanded
novelty. The novelty that came in large hangings was
a suppressing of the delicate subjects that delight the imagination
by their playful grace, their association of
human life with all that is gaily exquisite. The mode
was for leaving the land of idealised mythology, for discarding
the flowers, the scrolls, the happy loves and
charming crew that lived among them, and for plunging
into Roman history, real and ugly, enwrapped in drapings
too full, cumbered with forced accessory, or into such
mythology as is represented in Cupid and Psyche.
(Plate facing page 132.)

The History of Esther illustrates the loss of imagination
sustained by the border which had come to be a mere
woven imitation, in shades of brown and yellow, of a
carved and gilded, wooden frame. At the close of the
reign of Louis XV, borders were frankly abandoned altogether.
Compare this state of things with the days when
Audran and Coypel were producing the sets of The
[Pg 133]
Seasons, The Months, and Don Quixote. It is aridness compared
to talented invention.

See larger image

CUPID AND PSYCHE

Gobelins Tapestry. Eighteenth Century. Design by Coypel

See larger image

PORTRAIT OF CATHERINE OF RUSSIA

Gobelins under Louis XVI.

The top note of the imitation of painting was struck
when the Gobelins set the task of becoming a portrait
maker. (Plate facing page 133.) The work was done,
it was bound to be, as royalty backed the demand. Portraits
were woven of Louis XV (to be seen now at
Versailles), and his queen, of Louis XVI and Marie
Antoinette, and others less well known. A better scheme
for limiting the talent of the weaver could not have been
suggested by his most ingenious enemy. He was a man
of talent or his art had not reached so high, and as such
must be untrammelled; but here was given him a work
where personal discretion was not allowed, where he must
copy tone for tone, shade by shade, the myriad indefinite
blendings of the brush.

It is this practice, pursued to its end, that has made of
the tapestry weaver a mere part of a machine, and tapestry-making
a lost art, to remain in obscurity until weavers
return to the time before the French decadence.

The temper of those who hold in their hands the direction
of the people, these are the determining causes of
the products of that age. If d’Angivillier was responsible
for displacing a transcendent art with a false one,
if he routed a dainty mythology and its accessories with
the heavy effort and paraphernalia of the Romans, on
whom shall we place the entirely supportable responsibility
of diminishing tapestries from noble draperies
down to mere furniture coverings?

The result came happily, with much fluttering of fans,
[Pg 134]
dropping of handkerchiefs, with powder, patches, intrigues,
naughty sports, and a general necessity for a gay
company to divide itself into groups of four or two—a
lady and a cavalier, forsooth—the inevitable man and
maid. In the time of the preceding king, Louis XIV,
the court lived in masses. Life was a pageant, a grand
one, moving in slow dignity of gorgeous crowds, but a
pageant on which beat the fierce light of a throne jealous
of its grandeur. No chance was here for sweet escape
and no chance for light communing.

But all that saw a change. The needs of the lighter
court and the lighter people, were for reminders that life
is a merry dance in which partners change often, and sitting-out
a figure with one of them is part of the game.

Perhaps the huge apartments were not to the taste of
Regent Philippe, and certainly they were not convenient
to the life of the king when he came to man’s estate. So,
down came the ceiling’s height, and closer drew the walls,
until the model of the Petit Trianon was reached and considered
the ideal—if that were not indeed the miniature
Swiss Cottage.

What place had an acre of tapestry in these little rooms?
How could yards of undulating colour hang over walls
that were already overlaid with the most exquisite low
relief in wood that has ever been carved this side of the
Renaissance in Italy? No place for it whatever. So,
out with it—the fashions have changed.

But there was the furniture. That, too, was smaller
than hitherto. But this was the day of artists skilled in
small design, and they must fill the need.

[Pg 135]

CHAPTER XIII

THE GOBELINS FACTORY (Continued)

AND so it came about that tapestry fell from the
walls, shrunk like a pricked balloon and landed
in miniature on chairs, sofas and screens.

How felt the artists about this domesticating of their
art? We are not told of the wry face they made when,
with ideals in their souls, they were set to compose chair-seats
for the Pompadour. Her preference was for
Boucher. Perhaps his revenge showed itself by treating
the bourgeoise courtisane to a bit of coarseness now and
then, slyly hid in dainties.

The artist, Louis Tessier, appeased himself by composing
for furniture a design of simple bouquets of flowers
thrown on a damask background; but, with such
surety of hand, such elegance, are these ornaments designed
and composed, that he who but runs past them
must feel the power of their exquisite beauty.

In this manufacture of small pieces the Gobelins factory
unhappily put itself on the same footing as Beauvais
and much confusion of the products has since resulted.
The dignity of the art was lowered when the size and
purpose of tapestries were reduced to mere furniture coverings.
The age of Louis XV, looked at decoratively,
was an age of miniature, and the reign that followed was
the same. When small chambers came into vogue,
[Pg 136]
furniture diminished to suit them, and not only were walls
too small for tapestries to hang on, but chairs, sofas and
screens offered less space than ever before for woven designs,
now preciously fine in quality and minutiæ.

Tapestry weaving now entered the region of fancy-work
for the drawing-room’s idle hour, and we see even
the king himself, lounging idly among his favourite companions,
working at a tiny loom, his latest pretty toy.
Compare this trifling with the attitude of Henri IV and
Louis XIV toward tapestry weaving, and we have the
situation in a nutshell.

Louis XV passed from the scene, likewise the charming
bits of immorality who danced through his reign.
However much we may disapprove their manner of life,
we are ever glad that their taste sanctioned—more than
that—urged, the production of a decorative style almost
unsurpassed. To the artists belong the glory, but times
were such that an artist must die of suppression if those
in power refuse to patronise his art. So we are glad that
Antoinette Poisson appreciated art, and that Jeanne Verbernier
made of it a serious consideration, for, what was
liked by La Pompadour and Du Barry must needs be
favoured by the king.

When Louis XVI came to the throne, the return to
antiquity for inspiration had already begun, but did not
fully develop until later on, when David became court
painter under Napoleon. Yet the tonic note of decoration
was classic. Designs were still small and details
were from Greek inspiration. As tapestries were still but
furniture coverings, this was not to be regretted, for nothing
[Pg 137]
could be better suited to small spaces, nor could drawing
be more exquisitely pure and chaste than when copied
from Greek detail.

See larger image

CHAIR OF TAPESTRY. STYLE OF LOUIS XV

See larger image

GOBELINS TAPESTRY (DETAIL) CRAMOISÉE. STYLE LOUIS XV

Count d’Angivillier kept the Gobelins factory from all
originality, sanctioned only the small wares for original
work, and forced a slavish copying of paintings for the
larger pieces. It is not deniable that some beautiful
hangings were produced, but the sad result is that pieces
of so many tones lose in value year by year, through the
gentle, inexorable touch of time; and, more deplorable
yet, the ambition and the originality of the master-weavers
was deprived of its very life-blood, and in time was
utterly atrophied.

In the time of Louis XVI, when Marie Antoinette was
in the flower of her inconsiderate elegance, the note of
the day was for art to be small, but perfect; the worth of
a work of art was determined by its size—in inverse
ratio. It was a time lively and intellectual and frivolous,
and its art was the reflection of its desire for concentrated
completeness.

In the reign of Louis XVI ripened, not the art of Louis
XIV, but the political situation whose seeds he had
planted. The idea of revolution which started in the
little-considered American colonies, took hold of the
thinkers of France, even to the king of little power. But
instead of being a theory of remedy for important men
to discuss, it acted as a fire-brand thrown among the inflammable,
long-oppressed Third Estate—with results
deplorable to the art which occupies our attention.

The Gobelins was already suffering at the début of the
[Pg 138]
Revolution. Its management had been relegated to men
more or less incapable; its art standards had been forced
lower and lower. Added to that its operatives were engaged
at lessened rates and often had to whistle for their
pay at that. The contractors asked for nothing better
than to be engaged as masters of ateliers at fixed rates.

Then came the full force of the Revolution with such
deplorable and tragic results for the Gobelins. In the
madness of the time the workers here were not exempt
from the terrible call of Robespierre. The almoner of
the factory was arrested, and at the end of two months not
even a record existed of his execution, which took place
among the daily feasts of La Guillotine. A high-warp
weaver named Mangelschot met the same fate. Jean
Audran, once contractor for high-warp, then placed at
the head of the factory, was arrested, but escaped with
imprisonment only.

During his absence he was replaced as head by Augustin
Belle, whose respect for the Republic and for his
head made him curry favour with the mob in a manner
most deplorable. He caused the destruction by fire of
many and many a superb tapestry at the Gobelins, giving
as his reason that they contained emblems of royalty,
reminders of the hated race of kings. The amateur can
almost weep in thinking of this ruthless waste of beauty.

It was a celebrated bonfire that was built in the courtyard
of the Gobelins when, by order of the Committee on
Selection, all things offensive to an over-sensitive republican
irritability were heaped for the holocaust. As the
Gobelins was instituted by a king, patronised by kings,
[Pg 139]
its works made in the main for palaces and pageants after
the taste of kings, it was only too easy to find tapestries
meet for a fire that had as object the destruction of articles
displaying monarchical power.

During the four horrid years when terror reigned, the
workers at the Gobelins continued under a constant
threat of a cessation of work. Not only was their pay
irregular, but it was often given in paper that had sadly
depreciated in value. Then the decision was made to
sell certain valuable tapestries and pay expenses from this
source of revenue. But, alas, in those troublous times,
who had heart or purse to acquire works of art. A whole
skin and food to sustain it, were the serious objects of
life.

Under the Directory, funds were scarce in bleeding
France, and all sorts of ways were used to raise them.
In the past times when Louis XIV had by relentless extravagance
and wars depleted the purse, he caused the
patiently wrought precious metals to be melted into bullion.
Why not now resort to a similar method? So
thought a minister of one of the Two Chambers, and
suggested the burning of certain tapestries of the royal
collection in order that the gold and silver used in their
weaving might be converted into metal.

Sixty pieces, the most superb specimens of a king’s collection,
were transported to the court of La Monnaie,
and there burned to the last thread the wondrous work
of hundreds of talented artists and artisans. The very
smoke must have rolled out in pictures. The money
gained was considerable, 60,000 livres, showing how
[Pg 140]
richly endowed with metal threads were these sumptuous
hangings. The commission sitting by, judicial, dispassionate,
presided with cold dignity over the sacrifice, and
pronounced it good.

A hundred workers only remained at the Gobelins
which had once been a happy hive of more than eight
times that number, and these were constrained to follow
orders most objectionable and restrictive. Models to
copy were chosen by a jury of art, and such were its prejudices
that but little of interest remained. Ancient religious
suites, and royal ones were disapproved. New
orders consisted of portraits. But if we thought it a prostitution
of the art to weave portraits of Louis XV in royal
costume, or Marie Antoinette in the loveliness of her
queenly fripperies, what can be said of the low estate of
a factory which must give out a portrait of Marat or
Lepelletier, even though the great David painted the design
to be copied. The hundred men at the Gobelins
must have worked but sadly and desultorily over such
scant and distasteful commissioning.

There were works upon the looms when the Commission
began inspecting the works of art to see if they were
proper stuff for the newly-made Republic to nurse upon.
In September, 1794, they found and condemned twelve
large pieces on the looms unfinished, and on which work
was immediately suspended. Of three hundred and
twenty-one models examined, which were the property of
the factory, one hundred and twenty were rejected. In
fact, only twenty were designated as truly fit for production,
not falling under the epithets “anti-republican,
[Pg 141]
fanatic or insufficient.” The latter description was applied
to all those exquisite fantasies of art that make the
periods Louis XV and Louis XVI a source of transcendent
delight to the lover of dainty intellectual design, and
include particularly the work of Boucher.

The mental and moral workings of the commission on
art may be tested by quoting from their own findings on
the Siege of Calais, a hanging by Berthélemy, depicting
an event of the Fourteenth Century. This is what the
temper of the times induced the Commission—among
whom were artists too—to say: “Subject regarded as
contrary to republican ideas; the pardon accorded to
the people of Calais was given by a tyrant through the
tears and supplications of the queen and child of a despot.
Rejected. In consequence the tapestry will be arrested
in its execution.”

The models allowed in this benumbing period were
those of hunting scenes, and antique groups such as the
Muses, or scenes from the life of Achilles.

A vicious system of pay was added to the vicious system
of art restriction. And so fell the Gobelins, to revive
in such small manner as was accorded it in the Nineteenth
Century.

Its great work was done. It had lifted up an art which
through inflation or barrenness Brussels had let train on
the ground like a fallen flag, and it had given to France
the glory of acquiring the highest period of perfection.

To France came the inspiration of gathering the industry
under the paternal care of the government, of
relieving it from the exigencies of private enterprise
[Pg 142]
which must of necessity fluctuate, of keeping the art in
dignified prosperity, and of devoting to its uses the highest
talent of both art and industry.

The Revolution and the Directory both hesitated to kill
an institution that had brought such glory to France, that
had placed her above all the world in tapestry producing.
But what deliberate intent did not accomplish, came
near being a fact through scant rations. Operators at the
Gobelins were irregularly paid, and the public purse
found onerous the burden of support.

But with the coming of Napoleon the personal note was
struck again. A man was at the head, a man whose ambition
invaded even the field of decoration. The Emperor
would not be in the least degree inferior in splendour
to the most magnificent of the hereditary kings of France.
The Gobelins had been their glory, it should add to his.

Louis David was the painter of the court, he whose
head was ever turned over his shoulder toward ancient
Greece and Rome, who not only preferred that source of
inspiration, but who realised the flattery implied to the
Emperor by using the designs of the countries he had
conquered. It was a graceful reminder of the trophies
of war.

So David not only painted Josephine as a lady of Pompeii
elongated on a Greek lounge, but he set the classic
style for the Gobelins factory when Napoleon gave to
the looms his imperial patronage. It was David who had
found favour with Revolutionary France by his untiring
efforts to produce a style differing fundamentally from
the style of kings, when kings and their ways were
[Pg 143]
unpopular. Technical exactness, with classic motives,
characterises his decorative work for the Gobelins.

The Emperor was hot for throne-room fittings that
spoke only of himself and of the empire he had built.
David made the designs, beautiful, chaste, as his invention
ever was, and dotted them with the inevitable bees
and eagles. Percier, the artist, helped with the painting,
but the throne itself was David’s and shows his talent in
the floating Victory of the back and the conventionalised
wreaths of the seat. The whole set, important enough
to mention, embraced eight arm chairs and six smaller
ones, besides two dozen classic seats of a kingly pattern,
and screens for fire and draughts, all with a red background
on which was woven in gold the pattern of wreaths
and branches of laurel and oak.

The Emperor made the Gobelins his especial care. He
committed it to the discretion of no one, but was himself
the director, and allowed no loom to set up its patterns
unsanctioned by his order. Even his campaigns left this
order operative. Is it to his credit as a genius, or his discredit
as a tyrant, that the chiefs of the Gobelins had to
follow him almost into battle to get permission to weave
a new hanging?

Portraits were woven—but let us not dwell on that.
That portraits were woven at the Gobelins (portraits as
such, not the resemblance of one figure out of a mass to
some great personage) brings ever a sigh of regret. It
is like the evidence of senility in some grand statesman
who has outlived his vigour. It is like the portrait of your
friend done in butter, or the White House at Washington
[Pg 144]
done in a paste of destroyed banknotes. In other words,
there is no excuse for it while paint and canvas exist.

Napoleon’s own portrait was made in full length twice,
and in bust ten times. The Empress was pictured at full
length and in bust, and the young King of Rome came in
for one portrait. The summit of bad art seemed reached
when it was proposed to copy in wool a painting of portrait
busts, carved in marble. This work was happily
unfinished when the empire gave place to the next form
of government.

It is unthinkable that Napoleon would not want his
reign glorified in manner like to that of hereditary kings
with pictured episodes, the conquests of his life, dramatic,
superb. David the court painter, supplied his canvas
Napoleon Crossing the Alps, and others followed.
Copying paintings was the order at the Gobelins, remember,
and that kind of work was done with infinite skill.
Numbers of grand scenes were planned, some set up on
the looms, but the great part were not done at all. Napoleon’s
triumph was full but brief; the years of his reign
were few. He interrupted work on large hangings by
his impatience to have the throne-room furniture ready
for the reception of Europe’s kings and ambassadors.
And when the time came that another man received in
that room, the big series of hangings which were to picture
his reign, even as the Life of the King pictured that
of Louis XIV, were scarcely begun.

[Pg 145]

CHAPTER XIV

BEAUVAIS

ANOTHER name to conjure with, after Gobelins
is Beauvais. In general it means to us squares of
beautiful foliage,—foliage graceful, acceptably
coloured, and of a pre-Raphaelite neatness. But it is not
limited to that class of work, nor yet to the chair-coverings
for which the factory of Beauvais is so justly celebrated.
This factory has woven even the magnificent
series of Raphael, the designs without which the Sistine
Chapel was considered incomplete. But this is anticipating,
and an inquiry into how these things came about
is a pleasure too great to miss.

The factory at Beauvais was founded by Colbert, under
Louis XIV, in 1664. In that respect it resembles the
Gobelins factory, but there existed an enormous difference
which had to do with the entire fate of the enterprise.
The Gobelins was founded for the king; Beauvais
was founded for commerce. The Gobelins was royally
conceived as a source of supply for palaces and
châteaux of royalty and royalty’s friends. Beauvais was
intended to supply with tapestry any persons who cared
to buy them, to the end that profit (if profit there were)
should be to the good of the country.

So the factory was founded at Beauvais as being convenient
to Paris, although it was not known as a place
[Pg 146]
where the industry had flourished hitherto, notwithstanding
the old tapestries still in the cathedral which are accorded
a local origin in the first half of the Sixteenth
Century. And the king granted it letters patent, and
large sums of money to start the enterprise, which had
to be given a building, and men to manage it and to work
therein, and materials to work with, in fact, the duplicate
in less degree of the appropriations for the Gobelins,
except that the furniture department was omitted.

The idea was practically the same as that in the mind
of the paternal Henri IV when he united the scattered
factories with royal interest and patronage, but with always
the large end in view of benefiting his people
financially, as well as in the province of art. With our
modern republican views we can criticise the disinterestedness
of a monarch who maintains a factory at enormous
public expense exclusively for the indulgence of
kings.

And yet, it seems impossible to make both an artistic
and commercial success of a tapestry factory—at least this
is the conclusion to which one is forced in a study of the
Beauvais factory.

Louis Hinart was the man appointed to construct the
buildings and to stock them, and the royal appropriation
therefor, was 60,000 livres. He was to engage a hundred
workers for the first year, more to be added; and special
prizes were temptingly offered for workmen coming from
other countries, and to the contractor for each tapestry
sold for exportation.

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HENRI IV BEFORE PARIS

Beauvais Tapestry, Seventeenth Century. Design by Vincent

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HENRI IV AND GABRIELLE D’ESTRÉES

Design by Vincent

Thus was trade to be encouraged, and the venture put
[Pg 147]
on its feet commercially. But alas, the factory was not
a success. Tapestries were woven, hundreds of them, and
they delight us now wherever we can find them, whether
low warp or high, whether large pieces with figures or
smaller pieces almost entirely verdure of an entrancing
kind. But the orders for large hangings, the heavy patronage
from outside France, was of the imagination only,
and the verdures for home consumption did not meet the
expenses of the factory. After twenty years of struggle,
Hinart was completely ruined and ceded the direction
of the factory to a Fleming of Tournai, Philip Béhagle.
As most of the workers were Flemish, this was probably
not disagreeable to them.

Béhagle, more energetic than Hinart, with a gift for
initiative, set the high-warp looms to work with extraordinary
activity. As though he would rival the great
Gobelins itself, he reproduced the most ambitious of
pieces, the Raphael series, Acts of the Apostles, and a long
list of ponderous groups wherein oversized gods disport
themselves in a heavy setting of architecture and voluminous
draperies. He also produced some contemporary
battle scenes which are now in the royal collection of
Sweden.

Not content with copying, Béhagle set up a school of
design in the factory, realising that the base of all decorative
art was design. Le Pape was the artist set over it.
From this grew many of the lovely smaller patterns which
have made the factory famous. Its garlands have ever
been inspired, and its work on borders is of exquisite conception
and execution.

[Pg 148]
It is considered a great fact in the history of the factory
that the king paid it a visit in 1686; that he paraded and
rested his important person under the shade of the living
verdure in its garden. But it seems more to the point that
Béhagle made for it a success both artistic and commercial,
and this continued as long as he had breath.

Also was it a feather in his cap that at the time when
the Gobelins factory was sighing and dying for lack of
funds, the provincial factory of Beauvais not only remained
prosperous, but opened its doors to many of the
starving operatives from the Gobelins ateliers, thus saving
them from the horrid fate of joining the Dragonades,
as some of their fellows had done.

But the followers of the able Béhagle had not his capability.
After his twenty years of prosperity the factory
languished under the direction of his widow and sons,
and that of the brothers Filleul, and Micou, up to the time
when the Regent Philip was fumbling the reigns of government,
and when everything but scepticism and Les
Precieuses was sinking into feeble disintegration. The
factory became a financial failure from which the regent
had not power to lift it.

Again we see the name of the son of Madame de Montespan,
the Duke d’Antin, who was at this time director
of buildings for the crown and in this capacity had the
power of choosing the directors of both the Gobelins and
Beauvais. The place of director at Beauvais was empty;
d’Antin must have the credit of filling it wisely with the
painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. He was a man endowed
with the sort of energy we are apt to consider modern and
[Pg 149]
American. He already occupied a high place in the
Gobelins, and retained it, too, while he lifted Beauvais
from the Slough of Despond, and carried it to its most
brilliant flowering.

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BEAUVAIS TAPESTRY. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

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BEAUVAIS TAPESTRY. TIME OF LOUIS XVI

Collection of Wm. Baumgarten, Esq., New York

It is only as the history of a factory touches us that
we are interested in its changes. The result of Oudry’s
direction is one that we see so frequently in a small way
that it is agreeable to recognise its cause. Oudry was
pre-eminently a painter of animals. Add to this the
tendency to draw cartoons in suites and the demand for
furniture coverings, and at once we have the raison d’être
of the design seen over and over again nowadays on old
tapestried chairs, the designs picturing the Fables of La
Fontaine. These were the especial work of Oudry who
composed them, who put into them his best work as animal
painter, and who set them on the looms of Beauvais many
times.

They had a success immediate. They became the fashion
of the day, and the pride of the factory. If the artist
had drawn with inspiration, the weavers copied with a
fidelity little short of talent. So it is not surprising that
a set of sofa and chairs on which these tapestries are displayed
brings now an average of a thousand dollars a
piece, even though the furniture frames are not excessively
rich.

Beauvais set the fashion for this suite, but as success
has imitators who hope for success, many factories both in
and out of France copied this series. How shall we know
the true from the false? By that sixth sense that has its
origin in a taste at once instinctive and cultivated.

[Pg 150]
Oudry drew hangings for the small panelled spaces of
the walls, to accompany this set of Fables. He also
painted scenes from Molière’s comedies, which at least
show him master of the human figure as well as of the
lines of animals.

We are now, it must be remembered, in the time of
Louis XV, the time of beautiful gaiety and light sarcasm,
of epigramme, and miniature, and of all that declared
itself multum in parvo. Therefore it was that even wall-hangings
were reduced in size and polished, so to speak,
to a perfection most admirable. Paintings were copied,
actually copied, on the looms, but however much the fact
may be deplored that tapestry had wandered far from its
original days of grand simplicity, it were unjust not to
recognise the exquisite perfection of the manner in vogue
in the middle of the Eighteenth Century, and of the perfection
of the craftsman.

The pieces of Beauvais that are accessible to us are
indeed charming to live with, especially the verdures of
Oudry on which he left the trace of his talent, never omitting
the characteristic fox or dog, or ducks, or pheasants
that give vital interest to a peep into the enchanted woodland.
At the same time the factory of Aubusson, and
looms in Flanders, were throwing upon the market a
quantity of verdures, of which the amateur must beware.
Oudry verdures or outdoor scenes are but few in model,
and beautifully woven.

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BEAUVAIS TAPESTRY. TIME OF LOUIS XIV

In the prosperity of Beauvais, ambition carried Oudry
into a gay rivalry with the Gobelins. Charles Coypel
had gained fame by a set of hangings in which scenes were
[Pg 151]
taken from Don Quixote. Oudry asked himself why he
should not rival them at Beauvais. The result was a
similar series, but composed by Charles Natoire, the
artist who had drawn a set of Antony and Cleopatra for
the Gobelins. The same idea extended to the furniture
coverings which ran to this design as well as to the Fables.
Thus originated a set familiar to those of us nowadays
who covet and who buy the rare old bits that the niggard
hand of the past accords to the seeker after the ancient.

Exquisite indeed are the hangings by the great interpreter
of the spirit of his time, François Boucher. His
designs broke from the limit of the Gobelins, and were
woven at Beauvais with the care and skill required for
proper interpretation of his land of mythology. Such
flushed skies of light, such clean, soft trees waving against
them and such human elegance and beauty grouped beneath,
have seldom been reproduced in tapestry, and almost
make one wonder if, after all, the weavers of the
Eighteenth Century were not right in copying a finished
painting rather than in interpreting a decorative cartoon.
But such thoughts border on heresy and schism; away
with them.

Casanova, Leprince, and a host of others are tacked onto
the list of artists who painted models. We can no longer
call them cartoons, so changed is the mode for Beauvais.
But Oudry and Boucher are pre-eminent.

To the former, who was director as well as artist, is
attributed the fame of the factory and the resulting commercial
success. The factory had a house for selling its
wares under the very nose of the Gobelins; had another
[Pg 152]
in the enemy’s country, Leipzig. And kings were the
patrons of these, as we know through the royal collections
in Italy, and Stockholm, where the King of Sweden was
an important collector.

It was in 1755 that Beauvais found itself without the
support of its leaders. Both Oudry and his partner in
business matters, Besnier, had died. And we are well on
toward the time when kingly support was a feeble and
uncertain quantity. The factory lacked the inspiration
and patronage to continue its importance.

In a few years more fell the blight of the Revolution.
The factory was closed.

It re-opened again under new conditions, but its brilliant
period was past. Will the conditions recur that can
again elevate to its former state of perfection this factory
that has given such keen delight, whose ancient works are
so prized by the amateur? It has given us thrilling examples
of the highly developed taste of tapestry weaving
of the Eighteenth Century, it has left us lovable designs
in miniature. We repulse the thought that these things
are all of the past. The factory still lives. Will not the
Twentieth Century see a restoration of its former prestige?

If it were only for the reproduction of the sets of furniture
of the style known as Louis XVI, the Beauvais loom
would have sufficient reason for existing at the present
day. Scenes from Don Quixote, however, and the pictured
fables of La Fontaine which we see on old chairs,
seem to need age to ripen them. These sets, when made
new, shown in all the freshness and unsoiled colour, and
unworn wool, and unfaded silk do not give pleasure.

See larger image

BEAUVAIS TAPESTRY

See larger image

CHAIR COVERING

Beauvais Tapestry. First Empire

[Pg 153]
But the familiar garlands and scrolls adapted from the
Greek, that were woven for the court of Marie Antoinette,
these are ever old and ever new, like all things vital. On
a background of solid colour, pale and tawny, is curved the
foliated scroll to reach the length of a sofa, and with this
is associated garlands or sprays of flowers that any flower-lover
would worship. Nothing more graceful nor more
tasteful could be conceived, and by such work is the Beauvais
factory best known, and on such lines might it well
continue.

[Pg 154]

CHAPTER XV

AUBUSSON

PERHAPS because of certain old and elegant carpets
lying under-foot in the glow and shadows of
old drawing-rooms that we love, the name of Aubusson
is one of interesting meaning. And yet history of
tapestry weaving at Aubusson lacks the importance that
gilds the Gobelins and Beauvais.

It just escaped that sine qua non, the dower of a king’s
favour. But let us be chronological, and not anticipate.

If antiquity is the thing, Aubusson claims it. There is
in the town this interesting tradition that when the invincible
Charles Martel beat the enemies of Christianity and
hammered out the word peace with his sword-blade, a lot
of the subdued Saracens from Spain remained in the
neighbourhood. It was at Poitiers in 732 that the final
blow was given to show the hordes of North Africa that
while a part of Spain might be theirs, they must stop below
the Pyrenees.

When swords are put by, the empty hand turns to its
accustomed crafts of peace. Poitiers is a weary journey
from Africa if the land ways are hostile, and all to be
traversed afoot. Rather than return, the conquered Saracens
stayed, so runs the legend of Aubusson, and quite
naturally fell into their home-craft of weaving. They
had a pretty gift indeed to bestow, for at that time, as in
[Pg 155]
ages before, the world’s best fabrics came from the luxurious
East. And so the Saracens, defeated at Poitiers
by Charles Martel, wandered to nearby Aubusson, wove
their cloths and gave the town the chance to set its earliest
looms at a date far back in the past.

The centuries went on, however, without much left
in the way of history-fabric or woven fabric until we approach
the time when tapestry-history begins all over
France, like sparse flowers glowing here and there in the
early spring wood.

When the Great Louis, with Colbert at his sumptuous
side, was by way of patronising magnificently those arts
which contributed to his own splendour, he set his all-seeing
eye upon Aubusson, and thought to make it a royal
factory.

He was far from establishing it—that was more than
accomplished already, not so much by the legendary
Saracens as by the busy populace who had as early as
1637 as many as two thousand workers. Going back a
little farther we find a record of four tapestries woven
there for Rheims.

It was, perhaps, this very prosperity, this ability to
stand alone that made Louis and Colbert think it worth
while to patronise the works at Aubusson. But it must
be said that at this time (1664) the factory was deteriorating.
Tapestry works are as sensitive as the veriest
exotic, and without the proper conditions fail and fade.
The wrong matter here was primarily the cartoons, which
were of the poorest. No artist controlled them, and the
workers strayed far from the copy set long before.
[Pg 156]
Added to that, the wool was of coarse, harsh quality and
the dyeing was badly done. All three faults remediable,
thought the two chief forces in the kingdom.

So Louis XIV announced to the sixteen hundred
weavers of Aubusson that he would give their works the
conspicuous privilege of taking on the name of the Royal
Manufactory at Aubusson. And, moreover, he declared
his wish to send them an artist to draw worthily, and a
master of the important craft of dyeing fast and lovely
colours.

Colbert drew up a series of articles and stipulations,
long papers of rules and restrictions which were considered
a necessary part of fine tapestry weaving. These
papers are tiresome to read—the constitution of many a
nation or a state is far less verbose. They give the impression
that the craft of tapestry weaving is beset with
every sort of small deceit, so protection must be the arrangement
between master and worker, and between the
factory and the great outside world, lying in wait to tear
with avaricious claws any fabric, woven or written, that
this document leaves unprotected. You get, too, the impression
that weavers took themselves a little too seriously.
There must have been other arts and crafts in the world
than theirs, but if so these men of long documents ignored
it.

Aubusson, then, took heart at the encouragement of the
king and his prime minister, enjoyed their fine new title
to flaunt before the world which lacked it, pored over
their new Articles of Faith, and awaited the new artist
and the new alchemist of colours.

[Pg 157]
But Louis XIV was a busy man, and Paris presented
enough activity to consume all his hours but the scant
group he allowed himself for sleep. So Aubusson was
forgot. Wars and pleasures both ravaged the royal purse,
and no money was left for indulgences to a tapestry factory
lying leagues distant from Paris and the satisfying
Gobelins.

Then came the agitation of religious conflict during
which Louis XIV was persuaded, coerced, nagged into
the condition of mind which made him put pen to the
Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the document that is
ever playing about the fortunes of tapestry weaving.
This was in 1685. Aubusson had struggled along on hope
for twenty years, under its epithet Royal, but now it had
to lose its best workers to the number of two hundred.
The Protestants had ever been among the best workers in
Louis’ kingdom, and by his prejudice he lost them. Germany
received some of the fugitives, notably, Pierre Mercier.

Near Aubusson were Felletin and Bellegarde, the three
towns forming the little group of factories of La Marche.
When the king’s act brought disaster to Aubusson, her
two neighbours suffered equally.

There was also another reason for a sagging of prosperity.
Beauvais was rapidly gaining in size and importance
under the patronage of the king and the wise
rule of its administrators. Beauvais with her high- and
low-warp looms, her artists from Paris and her privilege
to sell in the open market, lured from Aubusson the
patronage that might have kept her strong.

[Pg 158]
Thus things went on to the end of the Seventeenth Century
and the first quarter of the Eighteenth. Then in
1731 came deliverers in the persons of the painters, Jean
Joseph du Mons and Pierre de Montezert, and an able
dyer who aided them. Prosperity began anew. Not the
prosperity of the first half of the Seventeenth Century,
which was its best period, but a strong, healthy productiveness
which has lasted ever since. Two articles of faith
it adheres to—that the looms shall be invariably low, and
that the threads of the warp shall be of wool and wool
only.

Large quantities of strong-colour verdures from La
Marche and notably from Aubusson are offered to the
buyer throughout France. They are as easily adapted
to the wood panels of a modern dining-room as is stuff by
the yard, the pattern being merely a mass of trees divisible
almost anywhere. The colour scheme is often worked
out in blues instead of greens; a narrow border is on undisturbed
pieces, and the reverse of the tapestry is as full
of loose threads as the back of a cashmere rug. For the
most part these fragments are the work of the Eighteenth
Century. Older ones, with warmer colours introduced
bring much higher prices.

[Pg 159]

CHAPTER XVI

SAVONNERIE

THOSE who hold by the letter, leave out the velvety
product of La Savonnerie from the aristocratic
society of hangings woven in the classic
stitch of the Gobelins. They have reason. Yet, because
the weave is one we often see in galleries, also on furniture
both old and new, it is as well not to ignore its productions
in lofty silence.

Besides, it is rather interesting, this little branch of an
exotic industry that tried to run along beside the greater
and more artistic. It never has tried to be much higher
than a man’s feet, has been content for the most part to
soften and brighten floors that before its coming were left
in the cold bareness of tile or parquet. It crept up to
the backs and seats of chairs, and into panelled screens
a little later on, but never has it had much vogue on the
walls.

When we go back to its beginnings we come flat against
the Far East, as is usual. The history of the fabric which
is woven with a pile like that of heavy wool velvet, and
which is called Savonnerie, runs parallel to the long story
of tapestry proper, but to make its scant details one short
concrete chronicle it is best to put them all together.

From the East, then, came the idea of weaving in that
style of which only the people of the East were masters.
[Pg 160]
Oriental rugs as such were not attempted in either colour
or design, but one of the rug stitches was copied.

We have to run back to the time of Henri IV, a pleasing
time to turn to with its demonstration of how much
a powerful king loved the welfare of his people. When
he interested himself in tapestry, one of the three important
existing factories was stationed in the Louvre. This
was primarily for the hangings properly called tapestry,
but in the same place were looms for the production of
work “after the fashion of Turkey.” Sometimes it was
called work of “long wool” (longue laine) and sometimes
also “a la façon de Perse, ou du Levant,” as well as “of
the fashion of Turkey,”—all names giving credit to the
East from whence the stitch came by means of crusades,
invasions and other storied movements of the people of
a dim past.

How long ago this stitch came, is as uncertain as most
things in the Middle Ages. We know how persistently
the cultivated venturesome East overflowed Eastern Europe,
and how religious Europe thrust itself into the East,
and on these broad bases we plant our imaginings.

Away back in Burgundian times there are traces of the
use of this velvet stitch. Tapestries of Germany also
woven in the Fifteenth Century, use this stitch to heighten
the effect of details.

But the formation of an actual industry properly set
down in history and dignified by the name of its directors,
comes in the very first years of the Seventeenth Century
when Henri IV of France was living up to his high
ideals.

[Pg 161]
Pierre Dupont is the name to remember in this connexion.
He is styled the inventor of the velvet pile in
tapestry, but it were better to call him the adaptor. The
name of Savonnerie came from the building in which the
first looms were set up, an old soap factory, and thus the
velvet pile bears the misnomer of the Savonnerie.

Pierre Dupont (whose book “La Stromaturgie” might
be consulted by the book-lover) was one of the enthusiasts
included by Henri IV along with the best high-and low-warp
masters of France at that time. Being placed under
royal patronage, the Savonnerie style of weaving acquired
a dignity which it has ever had trouble in retaining
for the simple reason that the legitimate place for its
products seems to be the floor.

The Gobelins factory finally absorbed the Savonnerie,
but that was after it had been established in the Louvre.
Pierre Dupont who was director of tapestry works under
Henri IV even goes so far as to vaunt the works of French
production over those of “La Turquie.” The taste of
the day was doubtless far better pleased with the French
colour and drawing than with the designs of the East.

At any rate, this pretty wool velvet found such favour
with kings that even Louis XIV encouraged its continuance,
gathering it under the roof of the all-embracing
Gobelins.

A large royal order embraced ninety-two pieces, intended
to cover the Grand Galerie of the Louvre. Many
of these pieces are preserved to-day and are conserved by
the State.

If Savonnerie has never produced much that is
[Pg 162]
noteworthy in the line of art, at least it has given us many
pretty bits of an endearing softness, bits which cover a
chair or panel a screen, to the delight of both eye and
touch. The softness of the weave makes it especially appropriate
to furniture of the age of luxurious interiors
which is represented by the styles of Louis XV and Louis
XVI.

Portraits in this style of weave were executed at a time
when portraits were considered improved by translation
into wool, but except as curiosities they are scarcely successful.
An example hangs in the New York Metropolitan
Museum of Art. (Plate facing page 162.) In the
Gobelins factory of to-day are four looms for the manufacture
of Savonnerie.

See larger image

SAVONNERIE. PORTRAIT SUPPOSABLY OF LOUIS XV

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

See larger image

VULCAN AND VENUS SERIES. MORTLAKE

Collection of Philip Hiss, Esq., New York

[Pg 163]

CHAPTER XVII

MORTLAKE

1619-1703

THE three great epochs of tapestry weaving, with
their three localities which are roughly classed
as Arras in the Fifteenth Century, Brussels in the
Sixteenth Century, and Paris in the Seventeenth, had, as a
matter of course, many tributary looms. It is not supposable
that a craft so simple, when it is limited to unambitious
productions, should not be followed by hundreds
of modest people whose highest wish was to earn a
living by providing the market with what was then considered
as much a necessity as chairs and tables.

To take a little retrospective journey through Europe
and linger among these obscurer weavers would be delectable
pastime for the leisurely, and for the enthusiast.
But we are all more or less in a hurry, and incline toward
a courier who will point out the important spots without
having to hunt for them. Artois had not only Arras;
Flanders had not only Brussels; France had not only
the State ateliers of Paris and Beauvais; but all these
countries had smaller centres of production. The tapestries
from some of these we are able to identify, even to
weave a little history about them. These products are
recognisable through much study of marks and details
[Pg 164]
and much digging in learned foreign books, where careful
records are kept—a congenial business for the antiquary.

But even though we may neglect in the main the lesser
factories, there is one great development which must have
full notice. It is the important English venture known
as Mortlake.

Sully, standing at the elbow of Henri IV of France,
called James I of England the wisest fool in Europe. A
part of his wisdom was the encouraging in his own kingdom
the royal craft of tapestry-making. To this end he
followed the example set by that grand Henri of Navarre,
and gave the crown’s aid to establish and maintain works
for tapestry production.

The elegance of the Stuart came to the front, desiring
gratification; but craftiness had a hand in the matter, too.
After the introduction of Italian luxury into England by
Henry VIII, and the continuance of art’s revival through
the brilliant period of Elizabeth, it is not supposable that
no tapestry looms existed throughout the length and
breadth of the land at the time that James came down
from Scotland.

They were there; documents prove it. But they were
not of such condition as pleased the fastidious son of
Marie Stuart, who needs must import his weavers and his
artists. And therein was shown his craftiness, for he had
coaxed secretly from Flanders fifty expert weavers before
the canny Dutch knew their talented material was thus
being filched away. Every weaver was bound to secrecy,
lest the Low Countries, knowing the value of her clever
[Pg 165]
workmen, put a ban upon their going before the English
king had his full quota for the new venture.

Wandering about old London, one can identify now the
place where the king’s factory had habitat. The buildings
stood where now we find Queen’s Court Passage, and
near by, at Victoria Terrace, was the house set aside for
the limners or artists who drew and painted for the works.

To copy Henri IV in his success was dominant in the
mind of James I. To the able Sir Francis Crane he gave
the place of director of the works, and made with him a
contract similar to that made with François de la Planche
and Marc Comans in Paris by their king.

If to James I is owed the initial establishment, to Crane
is owed all else at that time. It was in 1619 that the
works were founded and Sir Francis took charge. He
was a gentleman born, was much seen at Court, had ambitions
of his own, too, and was cultivated in many ways of
mind and taste. Besides all this, he had a head for business
and an enthusiasm rampant, which could meet any
discouragement—and needed this faculty later, too.

The king then gave him the management of the venture,
started him with the royal favour, which was as good
as a fortune, with a building for the looms, with imported
workers who knew the tricks of the trade, and with a
pretty sum of money to boot.

Prudence was born with the enterprise; so the men from
the Low Countries were advised to become naturalised
to make them more likely to stay, and to bring other
workers over, Walloons, malcontents, religious fugitives,
or whatever, so long as the hands were skilful. Down
[Pg 166]
in Kent, they say those cottages were built for weavers,—those
lovable nests of big timbers, curved gables and small
leaded panes which we are so keen to restore and live in
these days.

To swell the number of workers, and to have an eye for
the future, there must be apprentices. The king looked
about among the city’s “hospitals” and saw many goodly
boys living at crown expense, with no specified occupation
during their adolescence. These he put as apprentices,
for a term of seven years, to work under the fifty
Flemish leaders. They were happy if they fell under the
care of Philip de Maecht, he of Flanders, who had wandered
down to Paris and served under De la Planche and
Comans, and now had been enticed to the new Mortlake.
He has left his visible mark on tapestries of his
production—his monogram, P.D.M. (Plate facing page
70.)

A designer for the factory, one who lived there, was
an inseparable part of it. And thus it came that Francis
Clein (or Cleyn) was permanently established. He
came from Denmark, but had taken an enlightening journey
to Italy, and had a fine equipment for the work,
which he carried on until 1658. His name is on several
tapestries now existing.

Even kings tire of their fulfilled wishes. James
wanted royal tapestry works, yet, when they were an
established fact, he wearied of the drafts on his purse
for their support. It was the old story of unfulfilled
obligations, of a royal purse plucked at by too many vital
interests to spend freely on art.

[Pg 167]
And Sir Francis Crane bore the brunt of the troubles.
Contracts with the king counted but lightly in face of his
enthusiasm. He continued the work, paid his men the
best he could, and let the king’s debt to him stand unsued.

In a few years—a very few, as it was then but 1623—he
was obliged to petition the king. His private fortune
was gone by the board, the workmen were clamouring
for wages past due, and the factory trembled.

Then it was the Prince of Wales showed the value of
his interest in the tapestries that were demonstrating the
artistic enterprise of England. The Italian taste was the
ultimate note in England as well as elsewhere—the Italy
of the Renaissance; and from Italy the prince had ordered
paintings and drawings. What was more to the
purpose at this hour of leanness, he ordered paid by the
crown a bill of seven hundred pounds, which covered
their expense. The king, unwillingly,—for needs pressed
on all sides—paid also Sir Francis Crane in part for
moneys he had expended, but left him struggling against
the hard conditions of a ruined private purse and a thin
royal one.

At this juncture, 1625, James I died, and his son
reigned in his stead. The Prince of Wales was now become
that beribboned, picturesque, French-spirited monarch,
whose figure on Whitehall eternally protests his
tragic death.

As Charles I, he had the power to foster the elegant
industry which now grew and flowered to a degree that
brought satisfaction then, and which yields a harvest of
delight in our own times. Sir Francis Crane was at last
[Pg 168]
to get the reward of enthusiasm and fidelity. Too much
reward, said the envious, who tried in all ways, fair and
foul, to drive him from what was now a lucrative and
conspicuous post. The money he had advanced the factory
came back to him, and more also. Ever a well-known
figure at court, he now even aspired to closer relations
with royalty, and built a magnificent country
home, which was large enough to accommodate a visiting
court. He even persuaded the king to visit the Mortlake
factory, that the royal presence might enhance the value
of art in the occult way known only to the subjects of
kings.

Debts from the crown were not always paid in clinking
coin, but often in grants of land, and by these grants Sir
Francis Crane became rich. But the prosperity of Crane
was not worth our recording were it not that it evidenced
the prosperity of Mortlake. From the death of James I
in 1625 for a period of ten years, the factory flowered and
fruited. Its productions were of the very finest that have
ever been produced in any country.

The reasons for this superiority were evident. First
of all, Mortlake was the pet of the king; next, Crane was
an able and devoted minister of its affairs; its artistic
inspiration came from the home of the highest art—Italy—and
its weavers were from that locality of sage and able
weavers—Flanders. Add to this, tapestries were the
fashion. Every man of wealth and importance felt them
a necessary chattel to his elegance. And add to this, too,
that Mortlake had almost a clean field. It was nearly
without rival in fine tapestry-making at that time. Brussels
[Pg 169]
had declined, and the Gobelins was not formed in
its inspired combination.

See larger image

VULCAN AND VENUS SERIES. MORTLAKE

Collection of Philip Hiss, Esq., New York

See larger image

VULCAN AND VENUS SERIES. MORTLAKE

Collection of Philip Hiss, Esq., New York

Besides this, were not the materials for the industry
found best within the confines of the kingdom? What
sheep in all the world produced such even, lustrous wool
as the muttons huddling or wandering on the undulating
prés salés of Kent; and was not wool, par excellence, the
ideal material for picture-weaving, better than silk or
glittering gold?

The hangings made then were superb. Thanks to destiny,
we have some left on which to lavish our enthusiasm.
The cartoons preferred came from Italy’s great dead masters.
First was Raphael. The Mortlake would try its
hand at nothing less than the great series made to finish
and soften the decoration of the Sistine Chapel. And so
the Acts of the Apostles were woven, and in such manner
as was worthy of them. They can be seen now in the
Garde Meuble. Van Dyck, the great Hollander, made
court painter to the king, drew borders for them, and was
proud to do it, too. Van Dyck’s other work here was a
portrait of Sir Francis Crane and one of himself.

Rubens likewise associated his great decorative genius
with the factory and gave to it his suite of six designs
for the Story of Achilles. Cleyn, the Mortlake art-director,
furnished a History of Hero and Leander, which
found home among the marvellous tapestries of the King
of Sweden.

There were other classic subjects, and the months as
well, but of especial interest to us is the Story of Vulcan.
Several pieces of this series have been lent to the
[Pg 170]
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, by their owners, Mrs.
von Zedlitz, and Philip Hiss, Esq. Thus, without going
far from home, thousands have been able to see these delightful
examples of the highest period of England’s tapestry
production. The series was woven for Charles I
when he was Prince of Wales, from cartoons by Francis
Cleyn, and woven by the master, Philip de Maecht. The
borders are especially interesting, and carry the emblematic
three feathers of the prince, as well as his monogram,
in Mrs. von Zedlitz’s example, The Expulsion of Vulcan.
(Coloured plate facing page 170.)

It was this same series of Vulcan that was used as a
text by Crane’s enemy to prove to the king, in 1630, that
Crane was profiting unduly and dishonestly from the
land grants given him in payment for arrears. The
plaintiff speaks of this set as being “the foundation of all
good tapestries in England.” We are fortunate in having
pieces from it in America.

Only by actual contact with the tapestry itself can the
beauty of the colour and the work be known. We well
believe the superior quality of the English wool when it
lies before us in smooth expanse of subtle colour. And
as for even weaving, it is there unsurpassed. Every inch
declares the talent and patience of the craftsman. As for
colour, it is on a low scale that makes blues seem like remembrance
of the sea, and reds like faint flushings
planned in warm contrast, while over all is thrown a veil
of delicate mist that may be of years, or may have been
done with intent, but is there to give poetic value to the
whole of the artist’s scheme.

See larger image

THE EXPULSION OF VULCAN FROM OLYMPUS

[Pg 171]
Sir Francis Crane died in 1636, and Captain Richard
Crane succeeded him. And then began the decline of a
factory which should have lived to save us deep regret.
This second Crane could not carry on the work, and besought
the king to relieve him by taking over the factory,
which was thenceforth known as King’s Works.

But civil wars came on in 1642 and other matters were
more urgent than the production of works of art. So evil
days fell upon the weavers.

Then came the black day when Charles was beheaded.
The Commonwealth, to do it justice, tried to keep alive
the industry. They put at its head a nobleman, Sir Gilbert
Pickering, and, to inspire the workers, brought a
new model for design.

They went to Hampton Court and took from there
The Triumph of Cæsar, by Mantegna, to serve as new
models. Some hope, too, lay in the weavers of the hour,
clever Hollanders taken prisoners in the war; and all this
while Cleyn directed.

But there were too many circumstances in the way, too
many hard knocks of fate. People were too poor to buy
good tapestries, and loose-woven, cheaper ones were
heavily imported—to the amount of $500,000 yearly—from
France and the Low Countries. Anti-Catholic
feeling displayed hatred toward the able Catholic weavers,
who were forced out of the country by proclamation.

The sad end of this story is that in 1702 a petition
was placed before the king asking permission to discontinue
the Mortlake works. It was granted in 1703, and
thus ended the English royal venture in England.

[Pg 172]

CHAPTER XVIII

IDENTIFICATIONS

IDENTIFYING tapestries is like playing a game, like
the solving of a piquant problem, like pursuing the
elusive snark. I know of no keener pleasure than
that of standing before a tapestry for the first time and
giving its name and history from one’s own knowledge,
and not from a museum catalogue or a friend’s recital.
The latter sources of information may be faulty, but your
own you can trust, for by delightful association with tapestries
and their literature you have become expert. The
catalogue is to be read, the friend is to be heard, in all
humility, because these supply points that one may not
know; but, who shall not say that an intensely human
gratification is experienced when the owner of a tapestry
with the Brussels mark tells you that it is a Gobelins,
or one with the History of Alexander tells you it is the
only set of that series ever woven, and you know better.

The first thing that strikes the eye and the intelligence
is the drawing, the general school to which it belongs.
There is matter for placing the piece in its right class.
It might be said to place it in its right century or quarter
century, but that tapestries were so often repeated in later
times, the cartoon having no copyright and therefore open
to all countries in all centuries. Next, then, to fix it
better, comes a study of the border, for therein lies many
[Pg 173]
a secret of identity, and borders were of the epoch in
which the weaving was done, even though the cartoon
for the centre came from an earlier time.

Last, as a finishing touch, come the marks in the galloon.
This is put last because so often they are absent, and so
often unknown, the sign of some ancient weaver lost in
the mists of years, although a well-known mark so instantly
identifies, that study of other details is secondary.

But under these three generalising heads comes all the
knowledge of the savant, for the truth about tapestries
is most elusive. Knowledge is to be gained only by a
lover of the objects, a lover willing to spend long hours
in association with his love, prowling among collections,
comparing, handling, studying designs, discerning colours,
searching for details, and indulging withal a nice
feeling for textures, a vision that feels them even without
touch of the hand.

If the study of design has not given a keen scent for
the vague quality which we call “feeling,” the eye would
better be trained still further, for herein lies the secret of
success in difficult places, and not only that, but if he
have not this sense he is deprived of one of the most
subtile thrills that the arts can excite.

But this sense is not a matter of untrained intuition.
It is the flower of erudition, the flame from a full heart,
or whatever dainty thing you choose to call it. It has its
origin primarily in keen observation of the various important
schools of design that have interested the world
for centuries. We unconsciously augment it even in following
the side-path of history in this modest volume.
[Pg 174]
Our studies here are but those of a summer morn or a
winter eve, yet they are in vain if they have not set up
a measuring standard or two within the mind.

GOTHIC DRAWING

First, and dearest to the lover of designs, comes the
Gothic, the style practised by those conscientious romantic
children-in-art, the Primitives. Their characteristics
in tapestry are much the same as in painting, as in
sculpture; for, weavers, painters, book-makers, sculptors,
were all expressing the same matter, all following the
same fashion. Therefore, to one’s help comes any and
every work of the primitive artists. Making allowance
for the difference in medium, the same religious feeling
is seen in the Burgundian set of The Sacraments in the
Metropolitan Museum of Arts, New York, as is found
in stone carving of the time which decorated churches and
tombs.

The figures in the Gothic tapestries show a dignified
restraint, a solemnity of pose, recalling the deadly seriousness
with which children play the game of grown-ups.
The artists of that day had to keep to their traditions; to
express without over-expression, was their difficult task
(as it is ours), but they had behind them the rigidity of
the Byzantine and Early Christian, so that every free line,
every vigorous pose or energetic action, was forging
ahead into a new country, a voyage of adventure for the
daring artist. Quite another affair was this from modern
restraint which consists in pruning down the voluptuous
lines following the too high Renaissance.

[Pg 175]
Faces are serious, but not animated. Dress reveals
charming matter concerning stuffs and modes in that far
time. But apart from these characteristics is the one
great feature of the arrangement of the figures, almost
without perspective. And therein lies one immense superiority
of the ancient designs of tapestries over the modern
as pure decorative fabric. Men and women are
placed with their accessories of furniture or architecture
all in the foreground, and each man has as many cubits
to his stature as his neighbour, not being dwarfed for
perspective, but only for modesty, as in the case of the
Lady’s companion in the Unicorn series—but that series
is of a later Gothic time than the early works of Arras.

A noticeable feature is that the centre of vision is
placed high on the tapestry. The eye must look to the
top to find all the strength of the design. The lower part
is covered with the sweeping robes or finished figures of
the folk who are playing their silent parts for the delight
of the eye. This covers well the space with large and
simple motive. No recourse is had to such artifice as
distant lands seen in perspective, nor angles of rooms, but
all is flat, brought frankly into intimate association with
the room that is lived in, so that these people of other
days seem really to enter into our very presence, to thrust
vitally their quaint selves into our company. This feature
of simple flatness is in so great contrast to later methods
of drawing that one becomes keenly conscious of it,
and deeply satisfied with its beauty. The purpose of decoration
and of furnishing seems to be most adequately
met when the attention is retained within the chamber and
[Pg 176]
not led out of it by trick of background nor lure of perspective,
no matter how enticing are the distant landscapes
or how noble the far palace of royalty. Thus the
Primitives struck a more intimately human note than the
artists of later and more sophisticated times.

The more archaic the tapestry, the simpler the motive,
is the rule. The early weavers of Arras and of France
were telling stories as naturally as possible, perhaps because
the ways of their times were simple, and brushed
aside all filigree with a directness almost brutal; but also,
perhaps, because technique was not highly developed,
either in him who drew with a pencil or him who copied
that drawing in threads of silk and wool and gold.
Whatever the cause, we can but rejoice at the result,
which, alas, is shown to us by but lamentably few remnants
outside of museums. These very archaic simple
pieces are, for the most part, work of the latter part of
the Fourteenth Century and the first part of the Fifteenth,
and as the history of tapestry shows, were almost invariably
woven in France or in Flanders. At the end of the
time mentioned, designs, while retaining much the same
characteristics already described, became more ambitious,
more complicated, and introduced many scenes into one
piece. This is easily proved by a comparison of the illustration
of The Baillée des Roses, or The Sacraments, with
The Sack of Jerusalem, all in the Metropolitan Museum.

The idea in the earliest Gothic cartoons—if the word
may be allowed here, was to make a single picture, a
unified group. Into the later cartoons came the fashion
of multiplying these groups on one field, so that a tapestry
[Pg 177]
had many points of interest, many scenes where tragedies
or comedies were being enacted. Ingenious were the
ways of the early artist to accomplish the separation between
the various scenes, which were sometimes divided
merely by their own attitudes, as folk dispose themselves
in groups in a large drawing-room; and sometimes were
divided by natural obstructions, like brooks and trees, or
by columns.

Later yet, all the antique eccentricities passed away,
and the laws of perspective and balance were fully developed
in an art which has an unspeakable charm. All the
things that modern art has decreed as crude or childish
has passed away, and the sweet flower of the Gothic perfection
unfolded its exquisite beauty. This Gothic
perfection was the Golden Age of tapestry.

ARCHITECTURAL DETAIL

The use of architecture in the old Gothic designs makes
a pleasing necessity of fastening our attention upon it.
In the very oldest drawing the sole use is to separate one
scene from another, in the same hanging. For this purpose
slender columns are used. It is intensely interesting
to note that these are the same variety of column that
meets us on every delightful prowl among old relics of
North Europe, relics of the days when man’s highest and
holiest energy expressed itself at last in the cathedral.
Those slender stems of the northern Gothic are verily the
stems of plants or of aspiring young trees, strong when
grouped, dainty when alone, and forming a refined division
for the various scenes in a picture. It must be
[Pg 178]
confessed that in the medium of aged wool they sometimes
totter with the effect of imminent fall, but that they do not
fall, only inspires the illusion that they belong to the marvellous
age of fairy-tale and fancy.

The careful observer takes a keen look at these columns
as a clue to dates. The shape of the shaft, whether round
or hectagonal, the ornament on the capitals, are indications.
It is not easy to know how long after a design is
adopted its use continues, but it is entirely a simple matter
to know that a tapestry bearing a capital designed in 1500
could not have been made prior to that time.

The columns, later on, took on a different character.
They lifted slender shafts more ornamented. It is as
though the restless men of Europe had come up from the
South and had brought with them reminiscences of those
tender models which shadowed the art of the Saracens,
the art which flavoured so much the art of Southern Europe.
The columns of many a cloister in Italy bear just
such lines of ornament, including the time when the
brothers Cosmati were illuminating the pattern with their
rich mosaic.

Then, later still, the columns burst into the exquisite
bloom of the early Renaissance, their character profoundly
different, but their use the same, that of dividing
scenes from one another on the same woven picture. But
as any allusion to the Renaissance seems to thrust us far
out onto a radiant plain, let us scamper back into the mysterious
wood of the Gothic and pick up a few more of its
indicative pebbles, even as did Hans and Gretel of fairyland.

[Pg 179]
A use of Gothic architectural detail gives a religious
look to tapestry, quite other than the later introduction of
castles. These castle strongholds of the Middle Ages
wasted no daintiness of construction, nor favoured light
ornament, nor dainty hand. They were, par excellence,
places of defence against the frequent enemy; so, in bastion
and tower they were piled in curving masses around
the scenes of the later Gothic tapestries. Even more,
they began to play an important part in the mise en scène,
and were drawn on tiny scale as habitations of the actors
in the play who thrust heads from windows no larger than
their throats, or who gathered in gigantic groups on disproportioned
tessellated roofs.

Occasionally a lovely lady in distress is seen in fine
raiment praying high Heaven for deliverance from the
top of a feudal pile not half as high as her stately figure.
Laws of proportion are quite lost in this naïve way of
telling a story, and one wonders whether the wise old
artist of other times, with his rigid solemnity was heroically
overcoming difficulties of traditional technique, or
whether he was smiling at the infantile taste of his
wealthy patrons. The past fashion in history was to record
only the lives and expressions of those great in
power. The artist is ever the servant of such, but may
he not have had his own private thoughts, unpurchaseable,
unsold, and therefore only for our divining. There
must have been a sense of humour then as now, and
twinkling eyes with which to see it.

[Pg 180]

GOTHIC FLOWERS

Always, in studying a Gothic tapestry, we find flowers.
The flowers of nature, they are, a simple nature at that,
and never to be thought of in the same day as the gorgeous,
expansive, proud flowers of the Seventeenth and
Eighteenth Century decoration. Those splendid later
blossoms flaunt their richness with assured swagger and
demand of man his homage, quite forgetting it is the flower’s
best part to give.

Botticelli had not outgrown the Gothic flowers when
he sprinkled them on the ambient air and floating robe
of his chaste and dreamy Venus, nor when he set them
about the elastic tripping feet of the Spring. He knew
their simple power, and so do we. Scarce a Gothic tapestry
is complete without them, happily for those bent on
identification, for rarely can one discover them without
the same thrill that accompanies the discovery of the first
violets and snowdrops in the awakening woods.

The old weavers set them low in the picture, used them
as space-fillers wherever space lay happily before them,
and they never exaggerated their size, a virtue of which
the full Renaissance cannot boast. They are the simplest
sort of flowers, the corolla of petals turning as frankly toward
the observer as the sunflower turns toward her god,
and little bells hanging as regularly as a chime. These
are their characteristics, easily recognisable and expressing
the unsophisticated charm of the creations of honest
childish hands. Irrelevancy is theirs, too. They spring
from stones or pavement as well as from turf or garden,
[Pg 181]
and thus express the more ardently their love for man and
for close association with him. When they are seen after
this manner, it is sure that the early men have set them,
just as Shakespeare, at the same epoch, set violets blue
and daisies pied, cowslip, rosemary “for remembrance,”
and other familiar dainties, in the grim foundation stones
of his tragedies.

A comparison of the different hangings available to the
amateur, or of the pictured examples given in this book,
will reveal more than can be well set down with the pen.
The use of flowers in the set of The Baillée des Roses is
exceptional, in that here the flowers form a harmonious
decorative scheme and are at the same time an important
part of the story which is pictured.

In other earliest examples they playfully peep within
the limits of the hanging. Important use is, however,
made of them in that altogether entrancing set of The
Lady and the Unicorn, where they indicate the beauties
of a fascinating park in which the delicate lady and her
attendant led a wondrous life guarded by two beasts as
fabulous as faithful, and the whole region of leaves and
petals but serving as a paradise for delectable white rabbits
and piquant monkeys. Could any modern indicate
by sophistry of brush or brain so intoxicating a fairyland,
so gracious a field of dear delights?

COSTUMES

A minute study of all the details of costume and accessories
is one of the measuring sticks with which we count
the years of a tapestry’s life. This applies more particularly
[Pg 182]
to the work prior to the Renaissance, to the time
when all characters were dressed in the mode of the day—another
evidence of that ingenuousness that delights us
who have passed the period where it is possible.

As we have noted before, a costume cannot be used
before its time, so, as much as anything can, the study of
its details prevents us from going too far back with its
date. When one has reached the point of identifying a
Gothic tapestry to where the exact decade is questioned,
the century having been ascertained, a careful study of
costumes outside the region of tapestries is necessary.
This leads one into a department all by itself and means
delightful hours in libraries poring over illustrated books
on costume. It means to learn in what manner our gods
and heroes of fact and fancy habited themselves, how
Berengaria wore her head-dress and Jehane de Bourgogne
her brocades, and how the eternally various sleeve
differed in its fashioning for both men and women.

Head-dresses were of such size and variety that they
form a study in themselves, and dates have been fixed by
these alone. The turban in its evolution is an interesting
study, and makes one wonder if that, too, did not wander
north from the Moorish occupancy of Spain and the wave
of inspiration which flowed unceasingly from the Orient
in the years when Europe created little without inspiration
from outside.

A patriarchal bearded man in sacerdotal robes of costly
elegance seriously impresses his fellows all through the
Gothic tapestries, and his rival is a swaggering, important
person, clean-shaven, in full brocaded skirt,
[Pg 183]
fur-bound, whose attitude declares him royal or near it. The
first of these is the model nowadays for stage kings, and
even a woman’s toilet must vaunt itself to get notice beside
his gorgeous array. He wears about his waist a
jewelled girdle of great splendour, and on his head some
impressive matter of either jewels or draping. His face
is usually full-bearded, but even when smooth, youth is
not expressed upon him. Youths of the same time are
more débonnaire, are springing about, clean-faced, clad
in short, belted pelisse, showing sprightly legs equally
ready to step quickly towards a lovely lady or to a field of
battle.

Soldiers—let a woman hesitate to speak of their dress
and arms in any tone but that of self-depreciating humility.
Suffice it to say that in the early work they wore the
armour of the time, whether the scene depicted were an
event of history cotemporaneous, or of the time of Moses.
Fashions in dress changed with deliberation then, and it
is to the arms carried by the men that we must sometimes
look for exactness of date.

LETTERING

The presence of letters is often noticed in hangings of
the Fourteenth, Fifteenth and early Sixteenth Centuries.
It was a fashion eminently satisfactory, a great assistance
to the observer. It helped tell the story, and, as these old
pictures had always a story to tell, it was entirely excusable—at
least, so it seems to one who has stood confounded
before a modern painting without a catalogue or other
indication as to the why of certain agitated figures.

[Pg 184]
The lettering was, in the older Gothic, explicit and
unstinted, in double or quadruple lines, in which case it
counts as decoration banded across top or bottom.
Again, it is as trifling as a word or two affixed to the
persons of the play to designate them. This lettering
may be French or Latin.

EARLY BACKGROUNDS

Backgrounds of the early Fifteenth Century deal much
in conventionalised, flat patterns, but fifty or sixty years
later, when figures began to be more crowded, there was
but little space left unoccupied by the participants in the
allegory, and this was filled by the artifices of architecture
or herbage that formed the divisions into the various
scenes. Later the designing artists decided to let into the
picture the light of distant fields and skies, and thus was
introduced the suggestion of space outside the limit of the
canvas.

LATER DRAWING

After the Gothic drawing, came the avalanche of the
Renaissance. That altered all. The Italian taste took
precedence, and from that time on the cartoons of tapestries
represent modern art, trailing through its various
fashions or modes of the hour. The purest Renaissance
is direct from the Italian artist, in tapestry as well as in
painting, but it is interesting to see the maladroitness of
the Flemish hand when left to draw cartoons for himself
after the new manner.

After the Renaissance came exaggeration and lack of
[Pg 185]
sincerity; then the improvement of the Seventeenth Century,
notably in France, and after that the dainty fancies
of the Eighteenth Century, and here we are dealing with
art so modern that it needs no elucidation. The drawing
in tapestries is a subject as fascinating as it is inexhaustible,
but, however much one may read on it, nothing equals
actual association with as many tapestries as are available,
for the eye must be trained by vision and not by intellectual
process alone.

[Pg 186]

CHAPTER XIX

IDENTIFICATIONS (Continued)

IF the amateur can have the fortune to see in the same
hour a tapestry of the early Fifteenth Century, and
one a hundred years later, and then one about 1550,
from Brussels, drawn by an Italian artist, he has before
him an exposition of tapestry weaving in its golden age
when it sweeps through its greatest periods and phases to
marvellous perfection. The earliest example gives acquaintance
with that almost fabled time of the Gothic
primitives in art; the second shows the highest development
of that art under the influence of civilisation, and
the third shows the obsession of the new art of the Renaissance.
It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that after the
revival of classic art the power of producing spontaneous
Gothic was lost forever. From that time on, every drawing
has had certain characteristics, certain sophistications
that the artist cannot escape except in a deliberate copy.

Modern art, we call it. In tapestry it began with a
freedom of drawing in figures, and an adoption of classic
ornament and architecture. In this connexion it is interesting
to note the introduction of Greek or Roman
detail in the columns that divide the scenes, to see saints
gathered by temples of classic form instead of Gothic.
If Renaissance details appear in a hanging called Gothic,
[Pg 187]
it is easy to see that the piece was woven after Europe
was infected with modern art, and this is an assistance in
placing dates; at least, it checks the tendency to slip back
too far in antiquity, a tendency of which we in a new
country are entirely guilty.

Lest too long a lingering on the subject of design become
wearisome, a mention of later designs is made
briefly. The simplicity of the early Renaissance, the
perfection of the high Renaissance, are both shown in
tapestry as well as in paintings, and so, too, is exemplified
the inflation that ended in tiresome exuberance.

After the fruit was ripe it fell into decay. After Sixteenth
Century perfection, Seventeenth Century designs
fell of their own overweight, figures were too exaggerated,
draperies billowed out as in a perpetual gale,
architecture and landscapes were too important, and tapestries
became frankly pictures to attract the attention.
To this class of design belong all those monstrosities
which reflected and distorted the art of Raphael, and
which have been intimately associated with Scriptural
subjects down to our own times.

After Raphael, Rubens. Familiarity with this heroic
painter is the key to placing all the magnificent designs
similar to the set of Antony and Cleopatra (Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York).

Then came the easily recognisable designs of the
French ateliers of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries.
These are so frequently brought before us as to
seem almost like products of our own day. The earlier
ones seem (as ever) the purer art, the less sensual, appealing
[Pg 188]
to the more impersonal side of man, dealing in battles
and in classic subjects. Later, the drawings, becoming
more directly personal, in the time of Louis XIV portrayed
events in the Life of the King; in the next reign,
slipping into the pleasures of the Royal Hunts, from
which the descent was easy into depicting nothing higher
than the soft loveliness of the fantastic life of the time as
led by those of high estate. From Lebrun to Watteau
one can trace the gradual seductive decline, where heroic
ideal lowers softly in alluring decadence into a mere
tickling of the senses. And at this time the productions
of great tapestries stopped.

Before leaving the review of drawing or design, it is
well to recall that the fleeting fashions of the day usually
set the models, not in the manner of treatment which we
have been considering broadly, but in the subject of designs.
For example, the tendency to religious and morality
subjects in the Gothic, the love for Greek gods and
heroes in the Renaissance, the glorification of kings and
warriors at all times, and the portrayal of royal pleasures
in modern times. The months of the year were woven in
innumerable designs and formed an endless theme for
artists’ ingenuity during and after the Renaissance.

BORDERS

It is but natural that, with the expansion in drawing,
the freedom given the pencil, imagination leaped outside
the pictured scene and worked fantastically on the border,
and it is to the border that we turn for many a mark of
identification. The subject being a full one, it has longer
[Pg 189]
consideration in a separate chapter. First there is the simple
outlying tape, then the designed border. The early
Gothic was but a narrow line of flowers and berries; the
later more sophisticated Gothic enlarged and elaborated
this same motive without introducing another. The blossoms
grew larger, the fruit fuller and the modest cluster
of berries was crowded by pears, apples and larger fruit,
until a general air of full luxury was given. The design
was at first kept neatly within bordering lines of tape, but
later, overleaped them with a flaunting leaf or mutinous
flower.

Ribbons appeared early, then came fragmentary
glimpses of dainty columns which gave nice reasons for
the erect upstanding of so heavy a decoration. These all
were Gothic, but what came after shows the riotous
imagination of the Renaissance. It seemed in that fruitful
time, space itself were not large enough to hold the
designs within the artist’s brain. Certainly no corner of
a tapestry could be left unfilled, and not that alone, but
filled with perfect pictures instead of with a simple repeated
scheme of decoration. It was in this rich time
of production that the borders of tapestries grew to exceeding
width, and were divided into squares, each
square containing a scene. These scenes were often of
sufficient importance in composition to serve as models
for the centre of a tapestry, each one of them, which
thought gives a little idea of the fertility of the artists
in that untired period.

It was the delight of the great Raphael himself to expend
his talent on the border of his cartoons. From this
[Pg 190]
artist others took their cue with varying skill, but with
fine effect, and with unlimited interest to us. Those who
run have time to remark only the great central picture
in a hanging; but, to those who live with it, this added
line of exquisite panorama is an unceasing delight for the
contemplative hours of solitude. From this rich departure
from Gothic simplicity the artists grew into the same
fulness of design that ended in decadence. The border
became almost obnoxious in its inflated importance and
from voluptuous elegance changed to coarse overweight;
and by these signs we know the early inspired work from
its rank and monstrous aftergrowth in the Eighteenth
Century.

A quick glance at the plates showing the work of tapestry’s
next highwater mark, the hundred years of the
Gobelins’ best work, illustrates the difference between
that time and others, and shows also the gradual drop into
the border which is merely a woven representation of a
gilded wood frame to enclose the woven picture as
a painted one would be framed. The plate of Esther and
Ahasuerus illustrates this sort of border in the unmistakable
lines of Louis XV ornament.

POINT OF INTEREST

Allusion has been made to the placing of the point of
interest in a tapestry, but this is a matter to be studied
by much exercise of the eye. Perhaps the amateur knows
already much about it, an unconscious knowledge, and
needs only to be directed to his own store of observations.
As much as anything this change of design depended on
[Pg 191]
the uses the varying civilisation made of the hangings.
So much interest lies in this that I find myself ever prone
to recapitulate the very human facts of the past; the lining
of rude stone walls and the forming of interior doors,
which was the office of the early tapestries, and the loose
full draping of the same; then the gradual increase of
luxury in the finish of dwellings themselves, until tapestries
were a decoration only; and then the minimising of
grandeur under Louis XV when everything fell into
miniature and tapestries were demanded only in small
pieces that could be applied to screens or chairs—a prostitution
of art to the royal demand for prettiness.

Keeping these general ideas of the uses of tapestries in
mind, it is easy to reason out the course of the point of
interest in the design. The Gothic aim was to make
warm and comfortable the austere apartment; the Renaissance
sought to produce big decorative pictures to hang
in place of frescoes; and the French idea—beginning with
that same ideal—fell at last into the production of something
that should accompany the other arts in making
minutely ornate the home of man. Therefore, the
Gothic artist placed the point of interest high; the artists
of the Renaissance followed the rules of modern painting
(even to the point of becoming academic); and the last
good period of the Gobelins dropped into miniature and
decoration.

COLOURS

Colours we have not yet considered, in this chapter of
review for identification’s sake. They follow the same
[Pg 192]
line, have the same history, and this makes the beauty, the
logic and the consistency of our work, the work of tracing
to their source the products of other men and other times.