French Tapestries

The exhibition of a group of tapestries on loan from the Mobilier Nationale. The tapestries showed the development of the art of tapestry-making from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century in France. From the exhibition catalogue: ‘The French attention to refinement in design and craftsmanship always produces elegance and this is very apparent in all these works, whether of Gothic simplicity, Baroque grandeur or Rococo lightness and gaiety. The processes of designing and weaving a large tapestry are too lengthy to describe here but a brief note on the techniques may be helpful. The paintings of great artists, such as Raphael or Boucher, as well as those of lesser painters, provided designs for tapestries, from which the workshop artists made models, or full-scale working drawings in colour called cartoons. The tapestries were not necessarily all designed by one artist, the borders, the ‘alentours’ sometimes came from different hands, and painters in the manufactory each had their own specialty—architecture, landscape, animals, etc. There were two methods of weaving, ‘haute lisse’ or high warp weaving and ‘basse lisse’ or low warp weaving; the former is finer and was the method usually used at the Gobelins Manufactory while the latter was that employed at Beauvais. The process fundamentally is a simple one: the weaving of threads (weft) over and and under vertical or horizontal threads (warp) stretched on the loom and beaten down by a wooden comb, but it can be understood that in order to interpret the designs for the splendid hangings on view an extraordinary degree of skill was required by the weavers. This very skill finally contributed to the decline of tapestry as an art towards the end of the eighteenth century, with an over-concern for technique, until in the nineteenth century complete copies of paintings were made where every brush stroke was faithfully reproduced and the number of colours used was increased from forty to over six hundred. No longer were designs made specifically for tapestries. Happily in the second half of this century a revival has taken place with a renewed appreciation of the medium and a return to a limited palette.’