Published September 29, 1922, in an edition of 2000 copies. Copyright, 1922, by San Francisco Museum of Art. Reprinted November 15, 1922, 500 copies.
Printed by TAYLOR & TAYLOR, San Francisco. In the making of the type-design for the cover, the printer has introduced an illuminated fifteenth-century woodcut by an unknown master. Its original appears, illuminated as shown, in "L'Istoire de la Destruction de Troye la Grant," a book printed at Paris, dated May 12, 1484, of which only a single copy is known to exist, that in the Royal Library at Dresden, this reproduction having been made from the excellent facsimile of the block shown in Claudin's "Histoire de l'Imprimerie en France." The border-design of the cover is composed of the names of the chief tapestry-producing cities in Europe during the Gothic and Renaissance periods.
Halftones made by Commercial Art Company, San Francisco.
PREFACE
This historical exhibition of European Tapestries is the fourth in a series of retrospective exhibitions which we have planned to illustrate the chronological development of some important phase of world-art, as in the Old Masters Exhibition, held in the fall of 1920, or of the art of an individual in whose work is significantly reflected the spirit of his age, as in the J. Pierpont Morgan Collection of drawings and etchings by Rembrandt, exhibited here in the spring of 1920.
In its scope and general lines this exhibition follows closely the plan of our Exhibition of Paintings by Old Masters, and, as will at once be apparent from the subject-matter and treatment, covers the same period of European history. Although important exhibitions of European tapestries have been held at various times both here and abroad, it has remained for our museum to arrange the first complete historical survey of this art given in America. This collection presents in unbroken sequence the main currents influential in the development and decadence of the great art of tapestry-weaving in Europe, from the XIVth century down to and including the early XIXth century, as exhibited in the work of the foremost designers and weavers of the period, in examples that, for the most part, are brilliantly typical and always characteristic of their particular style.
Virtually, every loom of importance in France, Flanders, Germany, Switzerland, Spain, England, and Russia is here represented by historically famous pieces which run the entire gamut of subjects that engaged the interest of the most celebrated designers and weavers of each epoch, from allegorical, classical, historical, and mythological to genre subjects, landscapes, religious pieces, and even portraits and still-life subjects. The only omissions of any consequence are the Italian looms and Soho, and the output of these was relatively small and the examples extant are very scarce. However, their absence does not materially affect the historical integrity of the exhibition as a whole. On the other hand, the Gothic series is perhaps the most complete assemblage of all the most important types ever brought together at one time in this country, and every important type of Renaissance design is here included; the collection comprises two of the excessively rare products of the Fontainebleau ateliers, as well as unusually fine specimens of the relatively scarce examples of the Spanish and Russian looms.
My chief concern in organizing this exhibition has been to make it exemplify, first, the history of tapestry, and, second, its æsthetic qualities as these have appeared during the different periods of its changing and varying development, which, like the art of painting, had its naïve, primitive beginnings, its glorious culmination, and its decline. Therefore, every piece has been selected both to represent a distinct and significant type in the chronology of the art and to illustrate the artistic merits of that type, and all the tapestries shown are of the highest worth in their particular category and many of them are among the supreme masterpieces of European art, considered from whatever point of view one may choose to regard them. Only too long have these noble products of the loom been relegated to a secondary place in the history of European culture, which they did so much to celebrate. I sincerely trust that this exhibition, culled from seventeen collections in New York, San Francisco, and Paris, may successfully contribute something toward abolishing the hypnotic spell of the gold-framed oil-painting, that artistic fetish which too long has held the uncritical enthralled to the exclusion of other and ofttimes more authentic manifestations of the human spirit in art.
Regarded from the standpoint of design alone, the extraordinary co-ordination of color and pattern (not to speak of the depth and richness of the inner content) exhibited in certain of these pieces is a sharp challenge to the oft-repeated distinction drawn between the major and the minor arts, and one is constrained, after studying these tapestries, to conclude that there are no major or minor arts, only major and minor artists, and that greatness transfigures the material to the point of art, be it paint or potter's clay, and a simple Tanagra transcends in worth all the gilded and bejeweled banalities of Cellini, whose essentially flamboyant soul sought refuge in gold and precious stones. This truth, too rarely insisted upon, is of prime importance in any consideration of art, whether it be "fine" or applied art, and a collection such as this should do much to make it clear. Here one may observe how the principles of design and color that animate the immortal masterpieces of mural painting are identical with those that give life and vitality to these masterpieces of the loom, and thereby apprehend something of that mysterious law governing the operation of the creative impulse which finds its expression in all the arts, irrespective of time and place, whether it be in rugs, porcelains, Persian tiles and manuscripts, in European primitives, or in the works of Chinese and Japanese old masters, transcending racial differences and attaining a universal affinity that makes a Holbein one with a Chinese ancestral portrait. Surely such opulent fantasy of design and color as is revealed in Nos. 1, 3, 5, and 17, to mention only four of the Gothic pieces in the collection, is deserving of something better than the left-handed compliment of a comparison with painting.