The top note of the imitation of painting was struck when the Gobelins set the task of becoming a portrait maker. (Plate facing page [133].) 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.