The Tapestry Book Part 12

The Gobelins was already suffering at the debut of the Revolution.

Its management had been relegated to men more or less incapable; its art standards had been forced lower and lower. Added to that its operatives were engaged at lessened rates and often had to whistle for their pay at that. The contractors asked for nothing better than to be engaged as masters of ateliers at fixed rates.

Then came the full force of the Revolution with such deplorable and tragic results for the Gobelins. In the madness of the time the workers here were not exempt from the terrible call of Robespierre.

The almoner of the factory was arrested, and at the end of two months not even a record existed of his execution, which took place among the daily feasts of La Guillotine. A high-warp weaver named Mangelschot met the same fate. Jean Audran, once contractor for high-warp, then placed at the head of the factory, was arrested, but escaped with imprisonment only.

During his absence he was replaced as head by Augustin Belle, whose respect for the Republic and for his head made him curry favour with the mob in a manner most deplorable. He caused the destruction by fire of many and many a superb tapestry at the Gobelins, giving as his reason that they contained emblems of royalty, reminders of the hated race of kings. The amateur can almost weep in thinking of this ruthless waste of beauty.

It was a celebrated bonfire that was built in the courtyard of the Gobelins when, by order of the Committee on Selection, all things offensive to an over-sensitive republican irritability were heaped for the holocaust. As the Gobelins was inst.i.tuted by a king, patronised by kings, its works made in the main for palaces and pageants after the taste of kings, it was only too easy to find tapestries meet for a fire that had as object the destruction of articles displaying monarchical power.

During the four horrid years when terror reigned, the workers at the Gobelins continued under a constant threat of a cessation of work. Not only was their pay irregular, but it was often given in paper that had sadly depreciated in value. Then the decision was made to sell certain valuable tapestries and pay expenses from this source of revenue. But, alas, in those troublous times, who had heart or purse to acquire works of art. A whole skin and food to sustain it, were the serious objects of life.

Under the Directory, funds were scarce in bleeding France, and all sorts of ways were used to raise them. In the past times when Louis XIV had by relentless extravagance and wars depleted the purse, he caused the patiently wrought precious metals to be melted into bullion. Why not now resort to a similar method? So thought a minister of one of the Two Chambers, and suggested the burning of certain tapestries of the royal collection in order that the gold and silver used in their weaving might be converted into metal.

Sixty pieces, the most superb specimens of a king's collection, were transported to the court of La Monnaie, and there burned to the last thread the wondrous work of hundreds of talented artists and artisans.

The very smoke must have rolled out in pictures. The money gained was considerable, 60,000 livres, showing how richly endowed with metal threads were these sumptuous hangings. The commission sitting by, judicial, dispa.s.sionate, presided with cold dignity over the sacrifice, and p.r.o.nounced it good.

A hundred workers only remained at the Gobelins which had once been a happy hive of more than eight times that number, and these were constrained to follow orders most objectionable and restrictive.

Models to copy were chosen by a jury of art, and such were its prejudices that but little of interest remained. Ancient religious suites, and royal ones were disapproved. New orders consisted of portraits. But if we thought it a prost.i.tution of the art to weave portraits of Louis XV in royal costume, or Marie Antoinette in the loveliness of her queenly fripperies, what can be said of the low estate of a factory which must give out a portrait of Marat or Lepelletier, even though the great David painted the design to be copied. The hundred men at the Gobelins must have worked but sadly and desultorily over such scant and distasteful commissioning.

There were works upon the looms when the Commission began inspecting the works of art to see if they were proper stuff for the newly-made Republic to nurse upon. In September, 1794, they found and condemned twelve large pieces on the looms unfinished, and on which work was immediately suspended. Of three hundred and twenty-one models examined, which were the property of the factory, one hundred and twenty were rejected. In fact, only twenty were designated as truly fit for production, not falling under the epithets "anti-republican, fanatic or insufficient." The latter description was applied to all those exquisite fantasies of art that make the periods Louis XV and Louis XVI a source of transcendent delight to the lover of dainty intellectual design, and include particularly the work of Boucher.

The mental and moral workings of the commission on art may be tested by quoting from their own findings on the _Siege of Calais_, a hanging by Berthelemy, depicting an event of the Fourteenth Century. This is what the temper of the times induced the Commission--among whom were artists too--to say: "Subject regarded as contrary to republican ideas; the pardon accorded to the people of Calais was given by a tyrant through the tears and supplications of the queen and child of a despot. Rejected. In consequence the tapestry will be arrested in its execution."

The models allowed in this benumbing period were those of hunting scenes, and antique groups such as the _Muses_, or scenes from the life of Achilles.

A vicious system of pay was added to the vicious system of art restriction. And so fell the Gobelins, to revive in such small manner as was accorded it in the Nineteenth Century.

Its great work was done. It had lifted up an art which through inflation or barrenness Brussels had let train on the ground like a fallen flag, and it had given to France the glory of acquiring the highest period of perfection.

To France came the inspiration of gathering the industry under the paternal care of the government, of relieving it from the exigencies of private enterprise which must of necessity fluctuate, of keeping the art in dignified prosperity, and of devoting to its uses the highest talent of both art and industry.

The Revolution and the Directory both hesitated to kill an inst.i.tution that had brought such glory to France, that had placed her above all the world in tapestry producing. But what deliberate intent did not accomplish, came near being a fact through scant rations. Operators at the Gobelins were irregularly paid, and the public purse found onerous the burden of support.

But with the coming of Napoleon the personal note was struck again. A man was at the head, a man whose ambition invaded even the field of decoration. The Emperor would not be in the least degree inferior in splendour to the most magnificent of the hereditary kings of France.

The Gobelins had been their glory, it should add to his.

Louis David was the painter of the court, he whose head was ever turned over his shoulder toward ancient Greece and Rome, who not only preferred that source of inspiration, but who realised the flattery implied to the Emperor by using the designs of the countries he had conquered. It was a graceful reminder of the trophies of war.

So David not only painted Josephine as a lady of Pompeii elongated on a Greek lounge, but he set the cla.s.sic style for the Gobelins factory when Napoleon gave to the looms his imperial patronage. It was David who had found favour with Revolutionary France by his untiring efforts to produce a style differing fundamentally from the style of kings, when kings and their ways were unpopular. Technical exactness, with cla.s.sic motives, characterises his decorative work for the Gobelins.

The Emperor was hot for throne-room fittings that spoke only of himself and of the empire he had built. David made the designs, beautiful, chaste, as his invention ever was, and dotted them with the inevitable bees and eagles. Percier, the artist, helped with the painting, but the throne itself was David's and shows his talent in the floating Victory of the back and the conventionalised wreaths of the seat. The whole set, important enough to mention, embraced eight arm chairs and six smaller ones, besides two dozen cla.s.sic seats of a kingly pattern, and screens for fire and draughts, all with a red background on which was woven in gold the pattern of wreaths and branches of laurel and oak.

The Emperor made the Gobelins his especial care. He committed it to the discretion of no one, but was himself the director, and allowed no loom to set up its patterns unsanctioned by his order. Even his campaigns left this order operative. Is it to his credit as a genius, or his discredit as a tyrant, that the chiefs of the Gobelins had to follow him almost into battle to get permission to weave a new hanging?

Portraits were woven--but let us not dwell on that. That portraits were woven at the Gobelins (portraits as such, not the resemblance of one figure out of a ma.s.s to some great personage) brings ever a sigh of regret. It is like the evidence of senility in some grand statesman who has outlived his vigour. It is like the portrait of your friend done in b.u.t.ter, or the White House at Washington done in a paste of destroyed banknotes. In other words, there is no excuse for it while paint and canvas exist.

Napoleon's own portrait was made in full length twice, and in bust ten times. The Empress was pictured at full length and in bust, and the young King of Rome came in for one portrait. The summit of bad art seemed reached when it was proposed to copy in wool a painting of portrait busts, carved in marble. This work was happily unfinished when the empire gave place to the next form of government.

It is unthinkable that Napoleon would not want his reign glorified in manner like to that of hereditary kings with pictured episodes, the conquests of his life, dramatic, superb. David the court painter, supplied his canvas _Napoleon Crossing the Alps_, and others followed.

Copying paintings was the order at the Gobelins, remember, and that kind of work was done with infinite skill. Numbers of grand scenes were planned, some set up on the looms, but the great part were not done at all. Napoleon's triumph was full but brief; the years of his reign were few. He interrupted work on large hangings by his impatience to have the throne-room furniture ready for the reception of Europe's kings and amba.s.sadors. And when the time came that another man received in that room, the big series of hangings which were to picture his reign, even as the _Life of the King_ pictured that of Louis XIV, were scarcely begun.

CHAPTER XIV

BEAUVAIS

Another name to conjure with, after Gobelins is Beauvais. In general it means to us squares of beautiful foliage,--foliage graceful, acceptably coloured, and of a pre-Raphaelite neatness. But it is not limited to that cla.s.s of work, nor yet to the chair-coverings for which the factory of Beauvais is so justly celebrated. This factory has woven even the magnificent series of Raphael, the designs without which the Sistine Chapel was considered incomplete. But this is antic.i.p.ating, and an inquiry into how these things came about is a pleasure too great to miss.

The factory at Beauvais was founded by Colbert, under Louis XIV, in 1664. In that respect it resembles the Gobelins factory, but there existed an enormous difference which had to do with the entire fate of the enterprise. The Gobelins was founded for the king; Beauvais was founded for commerce. The Gobelins was royally conceived as a source of supply for palaces and chateaux of royalty and royalty's friends.

Beauvais was intended to supply with tapestry any persons who cared to buy them, to the end that profit (if profit there were) should be to the good of the country.

So the factory was founded at Beauvais as being convenient to Paris, although it was not known as a place where the industry had flourished hitherto, notwithstanding the old tapestries still in the cathedral which are accorded a local origin in the first half of the Sixteenth Century. And the king granted it letters patent, and large sums of money to start the enterprise, which had to be given a building, and men to manage it and to work therein, and materials to work with, in fact, the duplicate in less degree of the appropriations for the Gobelins, except that the furniture department was omitted.

The idea was practically the same as that in the mind of the paternal Henri IV when he united the scattered factories with royal interest and patronage, but with always the large end in view of benefiting his people financially, as well as in the province of art. With our modern republican views we can criticise the disinterestedness of a monarch who maintains a factory at enormous public expense exclusively for the indulgence of kings.

And yet, it seems impossible to make both an artistic and commercial success of a tapestry factory--at least this is the conclusion to which one is forced in a study of the Beauvais factory.

Louis Hinart was the man appointed to construct the buildings and to stock them, and the royal appropriation therefor, was 60,000 livres.

He was to engage a hundred workers for the first year, more to be added; and special prizes were temptingly offered for workmen coming from other countries, and to the contractor for each tapestry sold for exportation.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRI IV BEFORE PARIS

Beauvais Tapestry, Seventeenth Century. Design by Vincent]

[Ill.u.s.tration: HENRI IV AND GABRIELLE D'ESTReES

Design by Vincent]

Thus was trade to be encouraged, and the venture put on its feet commercially. But alas, the factory was not a success. Tapestries were woven, hundreds of them, and they delight us now wherever we can find them, whether low warp or high, whether large pieces with figures or smaller pieces almost entirely verdure of an entrancing kind. But the orders for large hangings, the heavy patronage from outside France, was of the imagination only, and the verdures for home consumption did not meet the expenses of the factory. After twenty years of struggle, Hinart was completely ruined and ceded the direction of the factory to a Fleming of Tournai, Philip Behagle. As most of the workers were Flemish, this was probably not disagreeable to them.

Behagle, more energetic than Hinart, with a gift for initiative, set the high-warp looms to work with extraordinary activity. As though he would rival the great Gobelins itself, he reproduced the most ambitious of pieces, the Raphael series, _Acts of the Apostles_, and a long list of ponderous groups wherein oversized G.o.ds disport themselves in a heavy setting of architecture and voluminous draperies. He also produced some contemporary battle scenes which are now in the royal collection of Sweden.

Not content with copying, Behagle set up a school of design in the factory, realising that the base of all decorative art was design. Le Pape was the artist set over it. From this grew many of the lovely smaller patterns which have made the factory famous. Its garlands have ever been inspired, and its work on borders is of exquisite conception and execution.

It is considered a great fact in the history of the factory that the king paid it a visit in 1686; that he paraded and rested his important person under the shade of the living verdure in its garden. But it seems more to the point that Behagle made for it a success both artistic and commercial, and this continued as long as he had breath.

Also was it a feather in his cap that at the time when the Gobelins factory was sighing and dying for lack of funds, the provincial factory of Beauvais not only remained prosperous, but opened its doors to many of the starving operatives from the Gobelins ateliers, thus saving them from the horrid fate of joining the Dragonades, as some of their fellows had done.

But the followers of the able Behagle had not his capability. After his twenty years of prosperity the factory languished under the direction of his widow and sons, and that of the brothers Filleul, and Micou, up to the time when the Regent Philip was fumbling the reigns of government, and when everything but scepticism and Les Precieuses was sinking into feeble disintegration. The factory became a financial failure from which the regent had not power to lift it.

Again we see the name of the son of Madame de Montespan, the Duke d'Antin, who was at this time director of buildings for the crown and in this capacity had the power of choosing the directors of both the Gobelins and Beauvais. The place of director at Beauvais was empty; d'Antin must have the credit of filling it wisely with the painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. He was a man endowed with the sort of energy we are apt to consider modern and American. He already occupied a high place in the Gobelins, and retained it, too, while he lifted Beauvais from the Slough of Despond, and carried it to its most brilliant flowering.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BEAUVAIS TAPESTRY. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York]