Tapestry

“ 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. ”

“ The work is almost purely mechanical; the face of the tapestry being below, and the weaving done from the back, the workman has no means of knowing what effect he is producing, and can only trust to a rigid method. The making of tapestry on the high-warp loom approximates in method to the painting of a picture; the artificer produces his form and colour, stitch by stitch, by the exercise of his own intelligence, and sees, in his little swinging mirror, the actual surface forming itself insensibly under his hand, as if it were a picture on the easel. ”

“ 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 ”

“ It is as impossible to describe a tapestry in words as it is to do the same by a Chartres window. In point of composition the tapestries of the fifteenth century are matched only by the greatest pictures; even when they are crowded with figures there is the most masterly spacing of masses, the most consummate balance of form. When one realises that in every case the design is the work of the members of the guild and not of the more famous painters of the time, the wonder grows over the apparently universal feeling for the highest type of artistic expression. ”

“ History has ever its reflection on arts and crafts, but perhaps it has in tapestry its most intentional record. It is a forced and deliberate piece of egoism when a monarch or a conqueror has a huge picture drawn exhibiting his grandeur in battle or his elegance at home. In some hangings modesty limits to the border of an imaginary and decorative scene the monogram of the heroine of history for whose apartments the tapestry was woven. ”

“ The sublime is the obverse of the tapestry with the figures heroic, saintly or sensuous, in battle or temple or bower, in conquest, love, martyrdom, adoration. The reverse of the tapestry is a matter of knots and tufts, broken patterns, ludicrous accidents of contour. The same threads make up both sides.
On one side of Charity's tapestry she saw herself as a pitiful figure, a neglected wife returned from errands of mercy to find her husband enamoured of a wanton. She spurned the proffered heart of a great knight while her own heart bled openly in her breast. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As soon as Baptiste left the room, I ran to the tapestry. I felt it all over. It was indeed a real woollen tapestry, rough to the touch like any other tapestry. Omphale resembled the charming phantom of the night only as a dead body resembles a living one. I lifted the hangings. The wall was solid throughout. There were no masked panels or secret doors. I only noticed that a few threads were broken in the groundwork of the tapestry where the feet of Omphale rested. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ TAPESTRY AND PILE WORK
Tapestry.—What are generally known in trade as tapestries, are figured fabrics for curtains, hangings, &c., not damask, which is distinct, being woven with only one warp and weft. Real tapestry is a hand-made fabric of very ancient origin, being in use since the days of the ancient Egyptians, who wove or worked it in a manner very similar to that employed at the present time. It does not belong to ‘jacquard weaving,’ but being the first in point of the excellence of its patterns amongst figured fabrics, a short description of it may not be out of place. ”

“ But wherever we have returned to life and nature, our work has always become vulgar, common, and uninteresting. Modern tapestry, with its aerial effects, its elaborate perspective, its broad expanses of waste sky, its faithful and laborious realism, has no beauty whatsoever. ”

“ Used as portières, tapestry does not show the full beauty of its wonderful time-worn colors and its fascination of texture. It is not everyone, however, who is able to own these almost priceless treasures of the past, and so modern machinery has been called to the aid of those who wish to cover their walls and furniture with tapestry. Many of these modern manufactures are really beautiful, thick in texture, soft in color, and often have the little imperfections and unevennesses of hand weaving reproduced, so that we feel the charm of the old in the new. ”

“ There is a very flagrant far-away imitation of tapestry which is so far from being good that it is a wonder it has had even a moderate success, imitation which does not even attempt the decorative effect of the genuine, but substitutes upon an admirably woven cotton or woollen canvas, figure panels, copied from modern French masters, and suggestive of nothing but bad art. ”

“ If your taste is for modern painted furniture and vivid Bakst colours in cushions and hangings, take your lovely old tapestry away. Speaking of tapestries, do not imagine that they can never be used in small rooms and narrow halls. Plate XIV shows an illustration of a hall in an old-fashioned country house, that was so narrow that it aroused despair. We call attention to the fact that it gains greatly in width from the perspective shown in the tapestry, one of the rare, old, painted kind, which depicts distance, wide vistas and a scene flooded with light. ”

“ 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 tapestry thrills with life: it is not a mere strip of worked linen, but what we in these latter days would call a “human document,” and it has come down through nine hundred years bearing more detail, more history, on its folds than has ever been told to us by any monkish parchment or royal scroll. ”

“ The intricate designs of tapestry were imitated by an infinite variety of flowering plants, whose tints blended in perfect harmony, like the colors of the material they were intended to represent. They acquired such dexterity in the culture of roses that, at all seasons of the year, they bloomed in profusion in every garden. ”

“ Tapestry, as we popularly think of it, in great rectangular wall-hangings with rather florid figures from Scriptural scenes, commonly dates from the sixteenth century or later, so that it is out of our scope to study its manufacture on an extensive scale. But there are earlier tapestries, much more restrained in design, and more interesting and frequently more beautiful. Of these earlier works there is less profusion, for the examples are rare and precious, and seldom come into the market nowadays. The later looms were of course more prolific as the technical facilities increased. ”

“ The largest sized and the more important kinds of tapestry, such as the “Gobelins,” are made in the high warp looms.
On account of the skill required, the accuracy and difficulty 326connected with the weaving of storied tapestry, it takes a long time to educate and perfect the training of a tapestry weaver—who must be an artist himself, so much being left to him in the selection, harmonizing, and shading of the different colours, even after the design is made that he is required to copy. ”

“ If we glance for a moment at the history of tapestry in this country, it will be seen how entirely it mirrors that of the embroideries under notice. Tapestry, as an English manufacture, and tapestry of sufficient amount to afford opportunities to any but a few to imitate it, can hardly be said to have existed in this country prior to the seventeenth century. ”

“ It is this to which the modern tapestry worker should address herself, if among the amusements of home she counts the making of curtains, and wall-coverings, and portières, which shall almost suggest the possibility that they once hung in a Florentine or a Venetian palace. A dark background of some cheap woolen stuff, a knowledge of drawing, the silk and woolen and cotton and linen threads now brought to our hand so cheaply—will all furnish forth the appliances for the making of tapestry hangings, such as a castellan of the Middle Ages would not have despised. ”

“ Paul Baudry appeared at about this time striking a clear pure note of delicate decoration. The few panels that he drew for the Gobelins charm the eye with happy reminiscences of Lebrun, of Claude Audran, a potpourri of petals fallen from the roses of yesterday mixed with the spices of to-day.
But if the work of this talented artist illustrates anything, it is the change in the uses of tapestries. The modern ones are made to be framed, as flat as the wall against which they are secured. In a word, they take the place of frescoes. The pleasure of touching a mobile fabric is lost. ”

“ In English, tapestry may mean almost any decorative stuff, and so comes it that we speak of the wonderful hanging which gives name to this chapter as the tapestry of Bayeux (plates facing pages 242, 243 and 244) , when it is in reality an embroidery. But so much is it confused with true tapestry, and so poignantly does it interest the Anglo-Saxon that we will introduce it here, even while acknowledging its extraneous character. ”

“ It is by this handling of the fabric that he acquires a skill in determining the make of many a tapestry. There is an indefinable quality about certain wools, and about the manner of their weaving that is only revealed by the touch. Not all hands are wise to detect, but only those of the sympathetic lover of the materials they handle—and I have found many such among the merchant collector. But even he finds identification a task as difficult as it is interesting, and spends hours of thought and research before arriving at a conclusion—and even then will retract on new evidence. ”

“ Tapestries required muscular strength, for the material was heavy, and so men were given this work in town workshops. The ladies did the needle, bobbin and pillow work in the castles [161] and convents. True tapestry is always woven on a loom, and is a combination of artistic design with skill in weaving.
This tapestry industry was introduced into Western Europe in the Middle Ages by the Moors, but we can trace the art of making woven pictures to much earlier times. ”

“ As in all wall-decoration, the first thing to be considered in the designing of Tapestry is the force, purity, and elegance of the silhouette of the objects represented, and nothing vague or indeterminate is admissible. But special excellences can be expected from it. Depth of tone, richness of colour, and exquisite gradation of tints are easily to be obtained in Tapestry; and it also demands that crispness and abundance{24} of beautiful detail which was the especial characteristic of fully developed Mediæval Art. ”

“ 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. ”