The Spell of Belgium

by Isabel Anderson

“Both high warp and low warp antedated the shuttle. In other words, they use bobbins that travel only part way across instead of shuttles that travel all the way across.” The high warp loom was also in use before the treadle. “In the low warp loom the odd threads of the warp are attached to a treadle worked with the left foot, the even threads of the warp to a treadle worked with the right foot, thus making possible the manipulation of the warp with the feet and leaving both hands free to pass the bobbins. In the high warp loom, that has no treadle, the warps are manipulated with the left hand while the right hand passes the bobbins back and forth. The term high warp means that the warp is strung vertically, low warp horizontally.”

Both are woven with the wrong side toward the weaver. “The wrong side in all real tapestries is just the same as the right side except for reversal of direction and for the loose threads.... In the high warp loom, the outline of the design is traced on the warp threads with India ink from tracing paper, and the coloured cartoon hangs behind the weaver, where he consults it constantly. In the low warp loom, the coloured cartoon is usually beneath the warp, and often rolls up with the tapestry as it is completed.”[5] In the eighteenth century, the low warp loom was considered better than the haute lisse, or high warp.

Great care has to be taken in dyeing the threads of the weft, which are much finer than those of the warp. Vegetable dyes, such as cochineal, madder, indigo, etc., must be used, for permanent colours can never be obtained with aniline dyes. The old Spanish dyes were considered the best. In this country, one sometimes gets the fine colours in an old Mexican serape or a prized Navajo blanket. The wool that is used to mend old tapestries in the American museums is coloured with dyes made by Miss Charlotte Pendleton in her workshop near Washington, which I have visited.

The Arras tapestries have a better and more attractive texture than any others. “Arras tapestries are line drawings formed by the combination of horizontal ribs with vertical weft threads and hatchings. There are no diagonal or irregular or floating threads, as in embroideries and brocades. Nor do any of the warp threads show, as in twills and damasks. The surface consists entirely of fine weft threads that completely interlace the coarser warp threads in plain weave (over and under alternately), and also completely cover them, so that only the ribs mark their position—one rib for each warp thread. Every Arras tapestry is a rep fabric, the number of ribs eight to twenty-four to the inch.” The finely woven textures are not always considered the best. “The most marvelous tapestries of the fifteenth century were comparatively coarse (from eight to twelve ribs), and of the sixteenth were moderately coarse (from ten to sixteen).”

Many of the early Gothic tapestries had inscriptions woven at the bottom or the top, but had no borders. It was not until toward the end of the fifteenth century that they began to develop these. They first had narrow verdure edgings, until Raphael introduced compartment borders in the set of the Gates of the Apostles, the most famous tapestries of the world. The most noted cartoons in existence are the designs for this set, in the Victoria and Albert Museum at South Kensington. Renaissance borders were much wider than the Gothic, and were filled with greens and flowers. At the end of the seventeenth century the borders took the form of imitation picture frames.

Gothic verdures are in reality coloured drawings in flat outline of trees and flowers with birds and animals. Renaissance verdures have more heavily shaded leaves and look more true to nature.

The majority of Gothic tapestries are anonymous as regards both maker and designer. With the Renaissance began the custom in Brussels and other Flemish cities of weaving the mark of the city into the bottom selvage, and the monogram of the weaver into the side selvage on the right. This custom was established by a city ordinance of Brussels in 1528. An edict of Charles V made it uniform, in 1544, for the whole of the Netherlands. After another century, weavers began to sign their full names or their initials in Roman letters, and monograms were discarded.

When the weavers of Arras took refuge in other countries, after the capture of that town by Louis XI, they went by thousands to England and France. In this way the French looms at Gobelins, Beauvais, and Aubusson were started, and those at Mortlake, in England.

As early as the fourteenth century, there was at least one eminent master weaver in Paris, Nicolas Bataille, in whose factory part of the remarkable Apocalypse set of the cathedral of Angers was woven. But even in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, French tapestries were far from equaling those of Flanders. In 1667, Colbert “established in the buildings of the Gobelins the furniture factory of the Crown under the direction of Charles Lebrun.”

The great establishment of “Les Gobelins,” by the way, has an interesting history. Jean and Philibert Gobelin built a dyehouse in the fifteenth century by the little stream of the Bièvre, in the Faubourg, whose waters had peculiar qualities that gave special excellence to their dyes. The family found dyeing so profitable that they were able to become bankers, and at the beginning of the seventeenth century they sold the establishment, which, however, still kept their name. Here Comans and Planche, tapestry weavers from Flanders, opened a factory in 1601. The edict of Henri Quatre by which they were incorporated gave them important privileges, but also obliged them to train apprentices and to establish the craft in the provinces.