The Tapestry Book Part 20

Low-warp work is the same except for the weaver's position in relation to his work. Instead of the warp like a thin wall before his face, on which he seems to play as on one side of a harp, the warp is extended before him as a table. It is easy to see how much more convenient is this method.

The wooden rollers are the same, one for the yet unused length of warp, the other for the finished fabric, and over one of these rollers the worker leans, protected from its hostile hardness by a pillow.

The pattern lies below, just beneath the warp, and easily seen through it, not the mere tracing as on the threads of the high-warp loom, but the coloured cartoon, so that shades may be followed as well as lines.

It sometimes happens, however, in copying a valuable old tapestry, that a black and white drawing only is placed under the warp while the original is suspended behind the weavers, who look to it for colour suggestion.

In low-warp the worker has the privilege of laying his flutes on top the work, the flutes not at the moment in use, and there they lie in convenient ma.s.s ready to resume for the figure abandoned for another.

If the right hand thrusts the flute, it is the duty of the left to see that the alternate and the limiting threads of the warp are properly lifted. First comes a pressure of the foot on a long, lath-like pedal which is attached to the bar holding in turn the loops which pa.s.s around alternate threads.

That pressure lifts the threads, and the fingers of the left hand, deft and agile, limit and select those which the flute shall cover with its coloured woof.

After the casting of a thread, or of a group of threads, the weaver picks up a comb of steel or of ivory, and packs hard the woof, one line against another, to make the fabric firm and even in the weaving.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAUMGARTEN TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY]

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAUMGARTEN TAPESTRY. MODERN CARTOON]

Such then is the simple process of the looms, far simpler seen than described and yet depending absolutely for its beauty on the talent and patience of gifted workers. It is as simple as the alphabet, yet as complicated as the dictionary.

Patient years of apprenticeship must a man spend before he can become a good weaver, and then must he give the best years of his life to becoming perfect in the craft. But if the work is exacting, at least it is agreeable, almost lovable, and in delightful contrast to the labour of those who but tend machines driven by power. And if the art of tapestry weaving is almost a lost one to-day, at least the weavers can find in history much matter for pride. It is no mean ambition to follow the profession of conscientious Nicolas Bataille, of the able Pannemaker, of La Planche and Comans, of Tessier, Cozette, and a hundred others of family and fame.

Much preparation is necessary before the loom can be set going. First is the design, the cartoon. There we are in the department of the artist, and must talk in whispers. Raphael belongs there, and Leonardo; and Rubens, Teniers, Lebrun, Boucher and David, train us through the past centuries into our own.

But the cartoon of to-day is not so sacred a matter, and we may speak of it frankly--regretfully, too. Cartoons hang all over the walls of the tapestry factory, so much property for the setting of future scenes, and besides, they make a decoration which alone would lift the tapestry factory into the regions of art and cla.s.s it among ateliers, instead of factories. The cartoons are painted, however, where the artist will, in his own studio or in one provided for the purpose by the director, as in the case of the Baumgarten works. They have the look of special designs. They are not done in the manner of a painting to be hung on a wall. Their brushwork is smooth and broad, dividing lines well distinguished by marked contrasts in colour to make possible their translation into the language of silk and wool.

After the cartoon is ready, comes the warp. That is set with the closeness agreed upon. Naturally, the smaller the thread of the warp, the closer is it set, the more threads to the inch, and thus comes fine fabric. Coa.r.s.er warp means fewer threads to the inch, quicker work for the weaver and less value to the tapestry. From ten to twenty threads to the inch carries the limits of coa.r.s.eness and fineness. In fine weaving, a weaver will accomplish but a square foot a week. Think of that, you who wonder at the price of tapestries ordered for the new drawing-room.

The warp comes to the factory all in big hanks of even thread.

Nowadays it is usually of cotton, although they contend at the Gobelins that wool warp is preferable, for it gives the finished fabric a lightness and flexibility that the heavier, stiffer cotton destroys.

Setting the warp is a matter of patience and precision, and we will leave the workman with it, to make it the whole length of the tapestry to be woven, and to fasten the loops of thread around each _chaine_ and to fasten those in turn, alternating, to the bar by means of which they may be shifted to make the in-and-out of the weaving.

Then after choosing the colours, the weaving begins. It is like nothing so much as a piece of fancy-work. If it were not for the c.u.mbersome loom, I am sure ladies would emulate the king who wove for amus.e.m.e.nt, and would make chair-pieces on the summer veranda.

But before the silks and wools go to the weaving they are treated to a beauty-bath in the dye-room. Hanks of wool and skeins of silk are but neutral matters, coming to the factory devoid of individuality, mere pale, soft bulk.

A room apart, somewhere away from the studio of design and the rooms where the looms stand stolid, is a laboratory of dyes, a place which looks like a farmhouse kitchen on preserving day. You sniff the air as you go in, the air that is swaying long bunches of pendulous colour, and it smells warm and moist and full of the suggestions of magic.

Over a big cauldron two men are bending, stirring a witches' broth to charm man's eye. One of the wooden paddles brings up a ma.s.s from the heavy liquid. It is silk, glistening rich, of the colour of melted rubies. Upstairs the looms are making it into a damask background onto which are thrown the garlands Boucher drew and Tessier loved to work.

Dainties fished up from another cauldron are strung along a line to dry, soft wool and shining silk, all in shades of grapes, of asters, of heliotropes, telling their manifest destiny. And beyond, are great bunches of colour, red which mounts a quivering scale to salmon pink, blue which sails into tempered gray, greens dancing to the note of the forest. It is a nature's workshop, a laboratory where the rainbow serves, apprenticed.

Jars, stone jars, little kegs, all ugly enough, are standing against the wall. But uncover one, touch the thick dark stuff within, and feast your eye on the colour left on a curious finger-tip. You are close to the cochineal, to indigo, and all the wonderful alchemy of colour.

Aniline? Not a bit of the treacherous stuff. It takes the eye, but it is a fickle friend. They say a mordant has been found to stay the flight of its lovely colours. Perhaps; it may be. But what weaver of tapestry would be willing to confide his labour to the care of a dye that has not known the test of ages? Aniline dye, says the director of a tapestry factory, may last twenty years--but twenty years is nothing in the life of a tapestry. Over in Paris, at the Gobelins, a master rules as chemist of the dyes, with the dignity of a special laboratory for making them.

In America, with no government a.s.suming the expense, the dyes are bought in such form that only expert dyers can use them in the few factories which exist. But no new hazards are taken. The matter is too serious. Economy in dyes brings too great disaster to contemplate. It is only too true that a man, several men, may labour a year to produce a perfect work, and that all the labour may be ruined by an ephemeral dye, by the escape of tones skilfully laid. Let commerce cheat in some other way, if it must, but not in this. Let the dye be honest, as enduring as the colours imprisoned in gems.

[Ill.u.s.tration: BAUMGARTEN TAPESTRY. MODERN CARTOON]

It is a modern economy. The ancients knew not of it, and were willing to spend any amount on colours. More than that a port, or a nation, was willing to rest its fame on a single colour. Purple of Tyre, red of Turkey, yellow of China, are terms familiar through the ages, and think not these colours were to be had for the asking. They brought prices which we do not pay now even in this age of money. The brothers Gobelins--their fame originally rested on their ambition to be "dyers of scarlet," that being an ultimate test of skill.

It is a serious matter, that of dyeing wools and silks for tapestries, and one which the directors conduct within the walls of the tapestry factory. The Gobelins uses for its reds, cochineal or the roots of the madder; for blue, indigo and Prussian blue; for yellow, the vegetable colour extracted from gaude.

In America there is a specialist in dyes: Miss Charlotte Pendleton, who gives her entire attention to rediscovering the dyes of the ancients, the dyes that made a city's fame. It is owing to her conscientious work that the tapestry repairers of museums can find appropriate threads.

It is interesting to trace the differing gamut of colour through the ages. Old dyes produced, old weavers needed, but twenty tones for the old work. Tapestries of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries were as simple in scale as stained gla.s.s, and as honest. Flesh tints were neutral by contrast to the splendid reds, honest yellows and rich greens. Colours meant something, then, too; had a sentimental language all their own. When white predominated, purity was implied; black was mortification of the flesh; livid yellow was tribulation; red, charity; green, meditation.

An examination of the colours in the series which depicts the life of Louis XIV, reveals a use of but seventy-nine colours. So up to that time, great honesty of dye, and fine decorative effect were preserved.

The shades were produced by two little tricks open as the day, hatching being one, the other, winding two shades on the same broche or shuttle. Hatching, as we know, is merely a penman's trick, of shading with lines of light and dark.

It was when they began to paint the lily, in the days of pretty corruption, that the whole matter of dyeing changed. In the Eighteenth Century when the Regent Philip, and then La Pompadour, set the mode, things greatly altered. When big decorative effects were no more, the stimulating effect of deep strong colour was considered vulgar, and, only the suave sweetness of Boucher, Nattier, Fragonard, were admired.

Every one played a pretty part, all life was a theatre of gay comedy, or a flattered miniature.

So, as we have seen, new times and new modes caused the Gobelins to copy paintings instead of to interpret cartoons--and there lay the destruction of their art. Instead of four-score tones, the dyers hung on their lines tens and tens of thousands. And the weavers wove them all into their fabric-painting, with the result that when the light lay on them long, the delicate shades faded and with them was lost the meaning of the design. And that is why the Gobelins of the older time are worth more as decoration than those of the later.

We are doing a little better nowadays. There is a limit to the tones, and in all new work a decided tendency to abandon the copying of brush-shading in favour of a more restricted gamut of colour. By this means the future worker may regain the lost charm of the simple old pieces of work.

Another room in the factory of tapestry interests those who like to see the creation of things. It is one of the prettiest rooms of all, and is more than ever like a kindergarten for grown-ups. Or, if you like, it is a chamber in a feudal castle where the women gather when the men are gone to war.

Here the workers are all girls and women, each bending over a large embroidery frame supported at a convenient level from the floor. On one frame is a long flowered border with cartouches in the strong rich colours of Louis XIV. On another a sofa-seat copied from Boucher. They are both new, but like all work fresh from the loom are full of the open slits left in the process of weaving, a necessity of the changing colours and the requirements of the drawing.

All these little slits, varying from half an inch to several inches in length, must be sewed with strong, careful st.i.tches before the tapestry can be considered complete.

On other frames are stretched old tapestries for repairs. At the Gobelins as many as forty women are thus employed. The malapropos deduction springs here that the demand for repaired old work is greater than that for new in the famous factory, for only six or eight weavers are there occupied.

Repairing is almost an art in itself. The emperor established a small school at Berlin for training girls in this trade. The studio of the late Mr. Ffoulke in Florence kept twenty or thirty girls occupied. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a repair studio under a graduate of the Berlin school. The factories of Baumgarten and of Herter, in New York, also conduct repairs; and the museum at Boston as well.

We cannot make old tapestries, but we can restore and preserve them by skilled labour in special ateliers. Restoration by the needle is the only perfect restoration, and this is as yet but little done here, although the method is so well known in Europe. We deplore the quicker way, to use the loom for weaving large sections of border or large bits which have gone into hopeless shreds, or have disappeared altogether by reason of the bitter years when tapestries had fallen into neglect. But the quicker way is the poorer, with these great claimants for time. The woven figures are relentless in this, that they claim of the living man a lion's share of his precious days. His reward is that they outlast him. Food for cynics lies there.

The careful worker looks close and sees the warp exposed like fiddle strings here and there. She matches the colour of silk and wool to the elusive shades and covers st.i.tch by st.i.tch the bare threads, in perfect imitation of the loom's way.

Sometimes the warp is gone. Then the work tests the best skill. The threads, the _chaine_, must be picked up, one by one, and united invisibly to the new, and then the pattern woven over with the needle.

It happens that large holes remain to be filled entirely, the pattern matched, the design caught or imagined from some other part of the fabric. That takes skill indeed. But it is done, and so well, that the repairer is called not that, but a restorer.

The two factories in New York, the Baumgarten and Herter ateliers, have certain employes always busy with repairs and restorations. Given even a fragment, the rest is supplied to make a perfect whole, in these studios where the manner of the old workers is so closely studied. For big repairs a drawing is made, a cartoon on the same principle as that of large cartoons, in colours, these following the old. Then it remains for the weaver to set his loom with the corresponding number of threads, that the new fabric may match the old in fineness. Then, too, comes the test of matching colours, a test that almost never discovers a worker equal to its exactions. That is as often as not the fault of the dyer who has supplied colours too fresh.

It is the repairs done by the needle that give the best effect, although such restorations are costly and slow.

Old repairs on old tapestries have been made, in some instances, very long ago. It often happens, in old sets, that a great piece of another tapestry has been roughly set in, like the knee-patches of a farm boy.

The object has been merely to fill the hole, not to match colour scheme or figure. And these patches are by the judicious restorer taken out and their place carefully filled with the needle.

Moths, say some, do not devour old tapestries. The reason given is that the ancient wool is so desiccated as to be no longer nutritious.

A pretty argument, but not to be trusted, for I have seen moths comfortably browsing on a Burgundian hanging, keeping house and raising families on such precious stuff.

Commerce demands that tricks shall be played in the repair room, but not such great ones that serious corruption will result. The coa.r.s.e verdures of the Eighteenth Century that were thrown lightly off the looms with transient interest are sought now for coverings to antique chairs. To give the unbroken greens more charm, an occasional bird is snipped from a worn branch where he has long and mutely reposed, and is posed anew on the centre of a back or seat. It is the part of the repairer to see that he looks at home in his new surroundings.

If metal threads have not been spoken of in this chapter on _modus operandi_, it is because metal is so little used since the time of Louis XV as to warrant omitting it. And the little that appears seems very different from the "gold of Cyprus" that made gorgeous and valuable the tapestries of Arras, of Brussels and of old Paris.