The Tapestry Book

by Helen Churchill Candee

It was when they began to paint the lily, in the days of pretty corruption, that the whole matter of dyeing changed. In the Eighteenth Century when the Regent Philip, and then La Pompadour, set the mode, things greatly altered. When big decorative effects were no more, the stimulating effect of deep strong colour was considered vulgar, and, only the suave sweetness of Boucher, Nattier, Fragonard, were admired. Every one played a pretty part, all life was a theatre of gay comedy, or a flattered miniature.

So, as we have seen, new times and new modes caused the Gobelins to copy paintings instead of to interpret cartoons—and there lay the destruction of their art. Instead of four-score tones, the dyers hung on their lines tens and tens of thousands. And the weavers wove them all into their fabric-painting, with the result that when the light lay on them long, the delicate shades faded and with them was lost the meaning of the design. And that is why the Gobelins of the older time are worth more as decoration than those of the later.

We are doing a little better nowadays. There is a limit to the tones, and in all new work a decided tendency to abandon the copying of brush-shading in favour of a more restricted gamut of colour. By this means the future worker may regain the lost charm of the simple old pieces of work.

Another room in the factory of tapestry interests those who like to see the creation of things. It is one of the prettiest rooms of all, and is more than ever like a kindergarten for grown-ups. Or, if you like, it is a chamber in a feudal castle where the women gather when the men are gone to war.

Here the workers are all girls and women, each bending over a large embroidery frame supported at a convenient level from the floor. On one frame is a long flowered border with cartouches in the strong rich colours of Louis XIV. On another a sofa-seat copied from Boucher. They are both new, but like all work fresh from the loom are full of the open slits left in the process of weaving, a necessity of the changing colours and the requirements of the drawing.

All these little slits, varying from half an inch to several inches in length, must be sewed with strong, careful stitches before the tapestry can be considered complete.

On other frames are stretched old tapestries for repairs. At the Gobelins as many as forty women are thus employed. The malapropos deduction springs here that the demand for repaired old work is greater than that for new in the famous factory, for only six or eight weavers are there occupied.

Repairing is almost an art in itself. The emperor established a small school at Berlin for training girls in this trade. The studio of the late Mr. Ffoulke in Florence kept twenty or thirty girls occupied. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a repair studio under a graduate of the Berlin school. The factories of Baumgarten and of Herter, in New York, also conduct repairs; and the museum at Boston as well.

We cannot make old tapestries, but we can restore and preserve them by skilled labour in special ateliers. Restoration by the needle is the only perfect restoration, and this is as yet but little done here, although the method is so well known in Europe. We deplore the quicker way, to use the loom for weaving large sections of border or large bits which have gone into hopeless shreds, or have disappeared altogether by reason of the bitter years when tapestries had fallen into neglect. But the quicker way is the poorer, with these great claimants for time. The woven figures are relentless in this, that they claim of the living man a lion’s share of his precious days. His reward is that they outlast him. Food for cynics lies there.

The careful worker looks close and sees the warp exposed like fiddle strings here and there. She matches the colour of silk and wool to the elusive shades and covers stitch by stitch the bare threads, in perfect imitation of the loom’s way.