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 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 |