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DESIGN BY RUBENS
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GOBELINS TAPESTRY. DESIGN BY RUBENS
Royal Collection, Madrid
The subjects for theHistory of the Kingwere 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 calledVisit of Louis XIV to the Gobelinsthat 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 page114.)
The borders of these sumptuous hangings are to be enjoyed when the original set can be seen, for the bordersare 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 theLife of the Kingnumbered 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 colourskept 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 theHistory of Alexanderis 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.
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.
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 threewomen 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.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 calledThe Judgment of Parisis 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 decorationin 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 thedepartment 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 interestsin 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 beautywith 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 godswere 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 tofix 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.
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 thePortières 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.
ThePortières of the Godswas, 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.
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GOBELINS TAPESTRY. TIME OF LOUIS XV
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 theGrotesque 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 ofDon 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 amedallion 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 classesof 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 splendidHistory of the Kingof 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 directionof 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 ofHunts 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 heroineArmide, who seemed almost to come of the Bible, since Tasso had set her in his ChristianJerusalem Delivered. The seductive palace and entrancing gardens where Renaud was kept a prisoner, gave opportunity for fine drawing in this set.
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HUNTS OF LOUIS XV
Gobelins, G. Audran after Cartoon by Oudry
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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, theItalian, 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 theHistory of Esther. (Plate facing page131.) 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 thefault 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 ofDon 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 inCupid and Psyche. (Plate facing page132.)
TheHistory of Estherillustrates 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 ofTheSeasons,The Months, andDon Quixote. It is aridness compared to talented invention.
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CUPID AND PSYCHE
Gobelins Tapestry. Eighteenth Century. Design by Coypel
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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 page133.) 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,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.
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,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 nothingcould be better suited to small spaces, nor could drawing be more exquisitely pure and chaste than when copied from Greek detail.
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CHAIR OF TAPESTRY. STYLE OF LOUIS XV
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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 theRevolution. 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,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 howrichly 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,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 theSiege 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 theMuses, 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 enterprisewhich 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 wereunpopular. 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 Washingtondone 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 canvasNapoleon 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 theLife of the Kingpictured that of Louis XIV, were scarcely begun.
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 placewhere 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.