XXII
TAPESTRY MADE AT BRUSSELS FROM GRANADA SILK
(16th Century. Spanish Crown Collection)
A new tapestry-factory—that of Santa Barbara—was founded shortly afterwards in a building known as the Casa del Abreviador. The first director, engaged in 1720 by order of Philip the Fifth, was Jacob Van der Goten, a native of Antwerp,[47] who died in 1724, and was succeeded at the factory by his sons, Francisco, Jacobo, Cornelius, and Adrian. These craftsmen worked with basse lisse looms till 1729, in which year a haute lisse loom was mounted by a Frenchman, Antoine Lenger.
In 1730, when the court removed to Seville, a tapestry-factory was established at this city also. The director was Jacob Van der Goten the younger, assisted by the painter Procaccini. At the end of three years this factory closed its doors, and Van der Goten and Procaccini, returning to Madrid, established themselves at the old factory of Santa Isabel, from which, in 1744, they again removed to the factory of Santa Barbara.[48]
In 1774, when, with the exception of Cornelius, who was considered the most skilful of them all, the family of the Van der Gotens had died out, the direction of the Santa Barbara factory was entrusted to several Spanish artists, named Manuel Sanchez, Antonio Moreno, Tomás del Castillo, and Domingo Galan. Sanchez, who acted as general superintendent of the works, died in 1786, and was succeeded in this office by his nephew, Livinio Stuck, whose son resumed the directorship in 1815, after the factory had been paralysed by the invasion of the Peninsula, and destroyed by the French in 1808. Since then it has never ceased working, and descendants of the Stucks continue to superintend it at the present day.
XXIII
A PROMENADE IN ANDALUSIA
(Cartoon for Tapestry. By Goya)
The collection of tapestry belonging to the Crown of Spain is probably the finest in the world. As far back as the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the walls of the royal palace were hung with decorative textile cloths or paños de Ras, and among the officers in the household of their son, the youthful Prince Don Juan, we find included a keeper of the tapestry and reposteros. But it was not until the reigns of Charles the Fifth and Philip the Second that the royal collection was enriched with numerous sets of celebrated tapestries produced in Italy and Flanders—countries which were then subjected to the yoke of Spain. Frequent additions were also made throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, both from abroad and subsequently (when the Brussels industry declined) from the Spanish factories of Santa Isabel and Santa Barbara.