THE making of inspired tapestry does not belong to to-day. The amour propre suffers a distinct pain in this acknowledgment. It were far more agreeable to foster the feeling that this age is in advance of any other, that we are at the front of the world’s progress.

So we are in many matters, but those matters are all bent toward one thing—making haste. Economy of time occupies the attention of scientist, inventor, labourer. Yet a lavish expenditure of time is the one thing the perfect tapestry inexorably demands, and that is the fundamental reason why it cannot now enter a brilliant period of production like those of the past.

It is not that one atelier cannot find enough weavers to devote their lives to sober, leisurely production; it is that the stimulating effect is gone, of a craft eagerly pursued in various centres, where guilds may be formed, where healthy rivalry spurs to excellence, where the world of the fine arts is also vitally concerned.

The great hangings of the past were the natural expression of decoration in those days, the natural demand of pomp, of splendour and of comfort. As in all things great and small, the act is but the visible expression of an inward impulse, and we of to-day have not the spirit that expresses itself in the reverent building of cathedrals, or in the inspired composition of tapestries. This is to be entirely distinguished from appreciation. That gift we have, and it is momentarily increasing. To be entirely commercial, which view is of course not the right one, one need only watch the reports of sales at home and abroad to see what this latter-day appreciation means in pelf. In England a tapestry was recently unearthed and identified as one of the series of seven woven for Cardinal Woolsey. It is not of extraordinary size, but was woven in the interesting years hovering above and below the century mark of 1500. The time was when public favour spoke for the upholding of morality with a conspicuousness which could be called Puritanism, were the anachronism possible. Pointing a moral was the fundamental excuse for pictorial art. This tapestry represents one of The Seven Deadly Sins. Hampton Court displays the three other known pieces of the series, and he who harbours this most recent discovery has paid $33,000 for the privilege.

But that is a tiny sum compared to the price that rumour accredits Mr. Morgan with paying for The Adoration of the Eternal Father (called also The Kingdom of Heaven). And this is topped by $750,000 paid for a Boucher set of five pieces. One might continue to enumerate the sales where enormous sums are laid down in appreciation of the men whose excellence of work we cannot achieve, but these sums paid only show with pathetic discouragement the completeness with which the spirit of commercialism has replaced the spirit of art, at least in the expression of art that occupies our attention.

MODERN AMERICAN TAPESTRY, LOUIS XV INSPIRATION

MODERN AMERICAN TAPESTRY FROM FRENCH INSPIRATION

If, then, this is not an age of production, but of appreciation, it, too, has its natural expression. First it is the acquiring at any sacrifice of the ancient hangings wherever they are found; and after that it is their restoration and preservation. This is the reason for recent high prices and the reason, too, for the establishment of ateliers of repair, which are found in all large centres in Europe as well as wherever any important museum exists in America.

It would not be possible nor profitable to dwell on the tapestry repair shops of Europe. They have always been; the industry is one that has existed since the Burgundian dukes tore holes in their magnificent tapestries by dragging them over the face of Europe, and since Henry the Eighth, in eager imitation of the continentals, established in the royal household a supervisor of tapestry repairs. Paris is full of repairers, and in the little streets on the other side of the Seine old women sit in doorways on a sunny day, defeating the efforts of time to destroy the loved toiles peintes. But this haphazard repair, done on the knee, as a garment might be mended, is not comparable to the careful, exact work of the restorer at her frame. One ranks as woman’s natural task of nine stitches, while the other is the work of intelligent patience and skilled endeavour.

Wherever looms are set up, a department of repair is the logical accompaniment. As every tapestry taken from the loom appears punctured with tiny slits, places left open in the weaving, and as all of these need careful sewing before the tapestry is finished, a corps of needlewomen is a part of a loom’s equipment. This is true in all but the ateliers of the Merton Abbey factory, of which we shall speak later.

Apart from repairs, what is being done in the present day? So little that historians of the future are going to find scant pickings for their record.

FRANCE

The Gobelins factory being the last one to make a permanent contribution to art, the impulse is to ask what it is doing now. That is easily answered, but there is no man so optimistic that he can find therein matter for hope.

France is commendably determined not to let the great industry die. It would seem a loss of ancient glory to shut down the Gobelins. Yet why does it live? It lives because a body of men have the patriotic pride to keep it alive. But as for its products, they are without inspiration, without beauty to the eye trained to higher expressions of art.

The Gobelins to-day is almost purely a museum, not only in the treasures it exposes in its collection of ancient “toiles,” but because here is preserved the use of the high-warp loom, and the same method of manufacture as in other and better times. A crowd of interested folk drift in and out between the portals, survey the Pavilion of Louis XIV and the court, the garden and the stream, then, turning inside, the modern surveys the work of the ancient, the remnants of time. And no less curious and no less remote do the old tapestries seem than the atelier where the high looms rear their cylinders and mute men play their colour harmonies on the warp. It all seems of other times; it all seems dead. And it is a dead art.

GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Luxembourg, Paris

GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Pantheon, Paris

The tapestries on the looms are garish, crude, modern art in its cheapest expression; or else they are brilliant-hued copies of time-softened paintings that were never meant to be translated into wool and silk.

The looms are always busy, nevertheless. There is always preserved a staff of officers, the director, the chemist of dyes, and all that; and the tapissiers are careful workmen, with perfection, not haste, in view. The State directs the work, the State pays for it, the State consumes the products. That is the Republic’s way of continuing the craft that was the serious pleasure of kings. But there is now no personal element to give it the vital touch. There is no Gabrielle d’EstrÉes, nor Henri IV; no Medici, no Louis XIV, no Pompadour. All is impersonal, uninspired.

Men who have worked in the deadening influence of the Gobelins declare that the factory cannot last much longer. But it is improbable that France—Republican France, that holds with bourgeois tenacity to aristocratic evidences—will abandon this, her expensive toy, her inheritance of the time of kings.

In the time of the Second Empire it was the fashion to copy, at the Gobelins, the portraits of celebrated personages executed by Winterhalter. The exquisite portrait of the beautiful Empress EugÉnie by this delectable court painter has a delicacy and grace that is all unhurt by contrast with more modern schools of painting. But fancy the texture of the lovely flesh copied in the medium of woven threads, no matter how delicately dyed and skilfully wrought. Painting is one art, tapestry-making is entirely another.

But that is just where the fault lay and continued, the inability of the Gobelins ateliers to understand that the two must not be confused. The same false idea that caused Winterhalter’s portraits to be copied, gave to the modern tapissiers the paintings of the high Renaissance to reproduce. Titian’s most celebrated works were set up on the loom, as for example the beautiful fancy known as Sacred and Profane Love, which perplexes the loiterer of to-day in the Villa Borghese. Other paintings copied were Raphael’s Transfiguration, Guido RenÉ’s Aurora, Andrea del Sarto’s Charity. There were many more, but this list gives sufficiently well the condition of inspiration at the Gobelins up to the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century.

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. A fold in such a dainty piece would break its beauty. Almost must a woven panel of our day fit the panel it fills as exactly as the wood-work of a room fits its dimensions.

The Nineteenth Century at the Gobelins was finished by mistakenly copying Ghirlandajo, Correggio, others of their time.

In the beginning of this century, the spirit of pure decoration again became animated. Instead of copying old painters, the Gobelins began to copy old cartoons. The effect of this is to increase the responsibility of the weaver, and with responsibility comes strength.

The models of Boucher, and the Grotesques of Italian Renaissance drawing are given even now to the weavers as a training in both taste and skill. But better than all is the present wisdom of the Gobelins, which has directly faced the fact that it were better to copy the tapestries of old excellence than to copy paintings of no matter what altitude of art.

Modern cartoons are used, as we know, commanded for various public buildings in France, but the copying of old tapestries exercises a far happier influence on the weavers. If this is not an age of creation in art, at least it need not be an age of false gods, notwithstanding the seriousness given to distortions of the Matisse and post-impressionist school.

A careful copying of old tapestries—and in this case old means those of the high periods of perfection—has led to a result from which much may be expected. This is the enormous reduction in the number of tones used. Gothic tapestries of stained glass effect had a restricted range of colour. By this brief gamut the weaver made his own gradations of colour, and the passage from light to shadow, by hatching, which was in effect but a weaving of alternating lines of two colours, much as an artist in pen-and-ink draws parallel lines for shading. Tapestries thus woven resist well the attacks of light and time.

To sum up the present attitude of the Gobelins, then, is to say that the director of to-day encourages the education of taste in the weavers by encouraging them to copy old tapestries instead of paintings old or new, and in a reduction of the number of the tones employed. The talent of an artist is thus made necessary to the tapissier, for shadings are left to him to accomplish by his own skill instead of by recourse to the forty thousand shades that are stored on the shelves of the store-room.

The manufactory at Beauvais, being also under the State, is associated with the greater factory in the glance at modern conditions. Both factories weave primarily for the State. Both factories keep alive an ancient industry, and both have permission to sell their precious wares to the private client. That such sales are rarely made is due to the indifference of the State, which stipulates that its own work shall have first place on the looms, that only when a loom is idle may it be used for a private patron. The length of time, therefore, that must elapse before an order is executed—two or three years, perhaps—is a tiresome condition that very few will accept.

THE ADORATION

Merton Abbey Tapestry. Figures by Burne-Jones

DAVID INSTRUCTING SOLOMON IN THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE

Merton Abbey Tapestry. Burne-Jones, Artist

Beauvais, with its low-warp looms, is more celebrated for its small pieces of work than for large hangings. The tendency toward the latter ended some time ago, and in our time Beauvais makes mainly those exquisite coverings for seats and screens that give the beholder a thrill of artistic joy and a determination to possess something similar. The models of BÉhagle, Oudry, Charron are copied with fidelity to their loveliness, and it is these that after a few years of wear on furniture take on that mellowness which long association with human hands alone can give. It is scarcely necessary to say that antique furniture tapestry is rare; its use has been too hard to withstand the years. Therefore, we may with joy and the complacency of good taste acquire new coverings of the Don Quixote or Æsop’s Fables designs for our latter-day furniture or for the fine old pieces from which the original tapestries have vanished.

ENGLAND

The chapter on Mortlake looms shows what was accomplished by deliberate importation of an art coveted but not indigenous. It is interesting to compare this with England’s entirely modern and self-made craft of the last thirty years. I allude to the tapestry factory established by William Morris and called Merton Abbey. Mr. Morris preferred the word arras as attached to his weavings, tapestry having sometimes the odious modern meaning of machine-made figured stuffs for any sort of furniture covering. But as Arras did not invent the high-warp hand-loom, nor did the Saracens, nor the Egyptians, it is but quibbling to give it arbitrarily the name of any particular locale.

It seems that enough can never be said about the versatility of William Morris and the strong flood of beauty in design that he sent rippling over arid ground. It were enough had he accomplished only the work in tapestry. It is not too strong a statement that he produced at Merton Abbey the only modern tapestries that fill the primary requirements of tapestries.

How did he happen upon it in these latter days? By worshipping the old hangings of the Gothic perfection, by finding the very soul of them, of their designers and of their craftsmen; then, letting that soul enter his, he set his fingers reverently to work to learn, as well, the secret of the ancient workman.

It was as early as 1885 that he began; was cartoonist, dyer, tapissier, all, for the experiment, which was a small square of verdure after the manner of the Gothic, curling big acanthus leaves about a softened rose, a mingling of greens of ocean and shady reds. Perhaps it was no great matter in the way of tapestry, but it was to Morris like the discovery of a new continent to the navigator.

His was the time of a so-called Æsthetic school in England. Watts, Rossetti and Burne-Jones were harking back to antiquity for inspiration. Morris associated with him the latter, who drew wondrous figures of maids and men and angels, figures filled with the devout spirit of the time when religion was paramount, and perfect with the art of to-day.

The romance of The Holy Grail gave happy theme for the work, and three beautiful tapestries made the set. The Adoration of the Magi was another, made for Exeter College, Oxford. Sir Edward Burne-Jones designed all these wondrous pictures, and the wisdom of Morris decreed that the Grail series should not be oft repeated. The first figure tapestry woven on the looms was a fancy drawn by Walter Crane, called The Goose Girl.

TRUTH BLINDFOLDED

Merton Abbey Tapestry. Byram Shaw, Artist

The most enchantingly mediÆval and most modernly perfect piece is by Burne-Jones, called David Instructing Solomon in the Building of the Temple. (Plate facing page 257.) In this the time of Gothic beauty lives again. Planes are repeated, figures are massed, detail is clear and impressive, yet modern laws of drawing concentrate the interest on the central action as strongly as though all else were subservient.

The Passing of Venus was Burne-Jones’ last cartoon for Merton Abbey looms. (Plate facing page 260.) Although a critique of the art of this great painter would be out of place in a book on the applied arts, at least it is allowable to express the conviction that more beautiful, more fitting designs for tapestry it would be difficult to imagine. Modern work of this sort has produced nothing that approaches them, preserving as they do the sincerity and reverence of a simple people, the ideality of a conscientious age, yet softening all technical faults with modern finish. An unhappy fact is that this tapestry, which was considered by the Merton Abbey works as its chef d’oeuvre, was destroyed by fire in the Brussels Exhibition of 1910.

Alas for tapestry weaving of to-day, the usual modern cartoon is a staring anachronism, and a conglomerate of modes. An “art nouveau” lady poses in a Gothic setting, a Thayer angel stands in a Boucher entourage, and both eye and intelligence are revolted. The master craftsman and artist, William Morris, alone has known how to produce acceptable modern work from modern cartoons. Other examples are Angeli Laudantes, and The Adoration. (Plates facing pages 261 and 256.)

A false note is sometimes struck, even in this factory of wondrous taste. In Truth Blindfolded (plate facing page 258), Mr. Byram Shaw has drawn the central figure as Cabanel might have done a decade ago, while every other figure in the group might have been done by some hand dead these four hundred years.

Morris’ manner of procedure differed little from that of the decorator Lebrun, although his work was a private enterprise and in no way to be compared with the royal factory of a rich king. Burne-Jones drew the figures; H. Dearle, a pupil, and Philip Webb drew backgrounds and animals, but Morris held in his own hands the arrangement of all. It was as though a gardener brought in a sheaf of cut roses and the master hand arranged them. Mr. Dearle directed some compositions with skill and talent.

With the passing of William Morris an inevitable change is visible in the cartoons. The Gothic note is not continued, nor the atmosphere of sanctity, which is its usual accompaniment. A tapestry of 1908 from the design of The Chace by Heyward Sumner suggests long hours with the Flemish landscapists of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, with a jarring note of Pan dragged in by the ears to huddle under foliage obviously introduced for this purpose.

THE PASSING OF VENUS

Merton Abbey Tapestry. Cartoon by Burne-Jones

ANGELI LAUDANTES

Merton Abbey Tapestry

But criticism of this aberration cannot hurt the wondrous inspired work directed by Morris, and which it were well for a beauty-loving world to have often repeated. Unhappily, the Merton Abbey works are bound not to repeat the superb series of the Grail. The entire set has been woven twice, and three pieces of it a third time—and there it ends. This is well for the value of the tapestries, but is it not a providence too thrifty when the public is considered? In ages to come, perhaps, other looms will repeat, and our times will glow with the fame thereof.

Before leaving the subject of the Merton Abbey tapestries, it is interesting to note a technical change in the weaving. By intertwisting the threads of the chain or warp at the back, a way is found to avoid the slits in weaving that are left to be sewn together with the needle in all old work. This method has been proved the stronger of the two. The strain of hanging proves too great for the strength of the stitches, and on many a tapestry appear gaping wounds which call for yet more stitching. But in the new method the fabric leaves the loom intact.

The determination of William Morris to catch old secrets by fitting his feet into old footsteps, led him to employ only the loom of the best weavers in the ancient long ago. The high-warp loom is the only one in use at the Merton Abbey works.

AMERICA

America makes heavy demands for tapestries, but the art of producing them is not indigenous here. We are not without looms, however. The first piece of tapestry woven in America—to please the ethnologist we will grant that it was woven by ZuÑi or Toltec or other aborigine. But the fabric approaching that of Arras or Gobelins, was woven in New York, in 1893, in the looms of the late William Baumgarten. It is preserved as a curiosity, as being the first. It is a chair seat woven after the designs popular with Louis XV and his court, a plain background of solid colour on which is thrown a floral ornament.

The loom was a small affair of the low-warp type, and was operated by a Frenchman who came to this country for the purpose of starting the craft on new soil.

The sequence to this small beginning was the establishment of tapestry ateliers at Williamsbridge, a suburb of New York. Like the Gobelins factory, this was located in an old building on the banks of a little stream, the Bronx. Workmen were imported, some from Aubusson, who knew the craft; these took apprentices, as of old, and trained them for the work. The looms were all of the low-warp pattern.

It may be of interest to those who like figures, to know that the work of the Baumgarten atelier averages in price about sixty dollars a square yard. Perhaps this will help a little in deciding whether or not the price is reasonable when a dealer seductively spreads his ancient wares. Modern cartoons of the Baumgarten factory lack the charm of the old designs, but the adaptations and copies of ancient pieces are particularly happy. No better execution could be wished for. The factory has increased its looms to the number of twenty-two, and has its regular corps of tapissiers, dyers, repairers, etc. Nowhere is the life of the weaver so nearly like that of his prototype in the golden age of tapestry. The colony on the Bronx is like a bit of old Europe set intact on American soil.

AMERICAN (BAUMGARTEN) TAPESTRY COPIED FROM THE GOTHIC

DRYADS AND FAUNS

From Herter Looms, New York, 1910

It is odd that New York should have more tapestry looms at work than has Paris. The Baumgarten looms exceed in number the present Gobelins, and the Herter looms add many more. The ateliers of Albert Herter are in the busiest part of New York, and here are woven by hand many fabrics of varying degrees of excellence. It is not Mr. Herter’s intention to produce only fine wall hangings, but to supply as well floor coverings “a la faÇon de Perse,” as the ancient documents had it, and to make it possible for persons of taste, but not necessarily fortune, to have hand-woven portiÈres of artistic value.

Apart from this commendable aim, the Herter looms are also given to making copies of the antique in the finest of weaving, and to producing certain original pieces expressing the decorative spirit of our day. Besides this, the work is distinguished by certain combinations of antique and modern style that confuse the seeker after purity of style. That the effect is pleasing must be acknowledged as illustrated in the plate showing a tapestry for the country house of Mrs. E. H. Harriman. (Plate facing page 263.) It is not easy in a review of tapestry weaving of to-day to find any great encouragement.

These are times of commerce more than of art. If art can be made profitable commercially, well and good. If not, it starves in a garret along with the artist. If the demand for modern tapestries was large enough, the art would flourish—perhaps. But it is not a large demand, for many reasons, chief among which is the incontrovertible one that the modern work is seldom pleasing. The whole world is occupied with science and commerce, and art does not create under their influence as in more ideal times. What can the trained eye and the cultivated taste do other than turn back to the products of other days?

We have artists in our own country whose qualities would make of them marvellous composers of cartoons. The imagination and execution of Maxfield Parrish, for example, added to his richness of colouring, would be translatable in wool under the hands of an artist-weaver. And the designs which take the name of “poster” and are characterised by strength, simplicity and few tones, why would they not give the same crispness of detail that constitutes one of the charms of Gothic work? Perhaps the factories existent in America will work out this line of thought, combine it with honesty of material and labour, and give us the honour of prominence in an ancient art’s revival.

FINIS