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.
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AMERICAN (BAUMGARTEN) TAPESTRY COPIED FROM THE GOTHIC