The Tapestry Book Part 22

The making of inspired tapestry does not belong to to-day. The _amour propre_ suffers a distinct pain in this acknowledgment. It were far more agreeable to foster the feeling that this age is in advance of any other, that we are at the front of the world's progress.

So we are in many matters, but those matters are all bent toward one thing--making haste. Economy of time occupies the attention of scientist, inventor, labourer. Yet a lavish expenditure of time is the one thing the perfect tapestry inexorably demands, and that is the fundamental reason why it cannot now enter a brilliant period of production like those of the past.

It is not that one atelier cannot find enough weavers to devote their lives to sober, leisurely production; it is that the stimulating effect is gone, of a craft eagerly pursued in various centres, where guilds may be formed, where healthy rivalry spurs to excellence, where the world of the fine arts is also vitally concerned.

The great hangings of the past were the natural expression of decoration in those days, the natural demand of pomp, of splendour and of comfort. As in all things great and small, the act is but the visible expression of an inward impulse, and we of to-day have not the spirit that expresses itself in the reverent building of cathedrals, or in the inspired composition of tapestries.

This is to be entirely distinguished from appreciation. That gift we have, and it is momentarily increasing. To be entirely commercial, which view is of course not the right one, one need only watch the reports of sales at home and abroad to see what this latter-day appreciation means in pelf. In England a tapestry was recently unearthed and identified as one of the series of seven woven for Cardinal Woolsey. It is not of extraordinary size, but was woven in the interesting years hovering above and below the century mark of 1500. The time was when public favour spoke for the upholding of morality with a conspicuousness which could be called Puritanism, were the anachronism possible. Pointing a moral was the fundamental excuse for pictorial art. This tapestry represents one of _The Seven Deadly Sins_. Hampton Court displays the three other known pieces of the series, and he who harbours this most recent discovery has paid $33,000 for the privilege.

But that is a tiny sum compared to the price that rumour accredits Mr.

Morgan with paying for _The Adoration of the Eternal Father_ (called also _The Kingdom of Heaven_). And this is topped by $750,000 paid for a Boucher set of five pieces. One might continue to enumerate the sales where enormous sums are laid down in appreciation of the men whose excellence of work we cannot achieve, but these sums paid only show with pathetic discouragement the completeness with which the spirit of commercialism has replaced the spirit of art, at least in the expression of art that occupies our attention.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MODERN AMERICAN TAPESTRY, LOUIS XV INSPIRATION]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MODERN AMERICAN TAPESTRY FROM FRENCH INSPIRATION]

If, then, this is not an age of production, but of appreciation, it, too, has its natural expression. First it is the acquiring at any sacrifice of the ancient hangings wherever they are found; and after that it is their restoration and preservation. This is the reason for recent high prices and the reason, too, for the establishment of ateliers of repair, which are found in all large centres in Europe as well as wherever any important museum exists in America.

It would not be possible nor profitable to dwell on the tapestry repair shops of Europe. They have always been; the industry is one that has existed since the Burgundian dukes tore holes in their magnificent tapestries by dragging them over the face of Europe, and since Henry the Eighth, in eager imitation of the continentals, established in the royal household a supervisor of tapestry repairs.

Paris is full of repairers, and in the little streets on the other side of the Seine old women sit in doorways on a sunny day, defeating the efforts of time to destroy the loved _toiles peintes_. But this haphazard repair, done on the knee, as a garment might be mended, is not comparable to the careful, exact work of the restorer at her frame. One ranks as woman's natural task of nine st.i.tches, while the other is the work of intelligent patience and skilled endeavour.

Wherever looms are set up, a department of repair is the logical accompaniment. As every tapestry taken from the loom appears punctured with tiny slits, places left open in the weaving, and as all of these need careful sewing before the tapestry is finished, a corps of needlewomen is a part of a loom's equipment. This is true in all but the ateliers of the Merton Abbey factory, of which we shall speak later.

Apart from repairs, what is being done in the present day? So little that historians of the future are going to find scant pickings for their record.

FRANCE

The Gobelins factory being the last one to make a permanent contribution to art, the impulse is to ask what it is doing now. That is easily answered, but there is no man so optimistic that he can find therein matter for hope.

France is commendably determined not to let the great industry die. It would seem a loss of ancient glory to shut down the Gobelins. Yet why does it live? It lives because a body of men have the patriotic pride to keep it alive. But as for its products, they are without inspiration, without beauty to the eye trained to higher expressions of art.

The Gobelins to-day is almost purely a museum, not only in the treasures it exposes in its collection of ancient "toiles," but because here is preserved the use of the high-warp loom, and the same method of manufacture as in other and better times. A crowd of interested folk drift in and out between the portals, survey the Pavilion of Louis XIV and the court, the garden and the stream, then, turning inside, the modern surveys the work of the ancient, the remnants of time. And no less curious and no less remote do the old tapestries seem than the atelier where the high looms rear their cylinders and mute men play their colour harmonies on the warp. It all seems of other times; it all seems dead. And it is a dead art.

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Luxembourg, Paris]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOBELINS TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Pantheon, Paris]

The tapestries on the looms are garish, crude, modern art in its cheapest expression; or else they are brilliant-hued copies of time-softened paintings that were never meant to be translated into wool and silk.

The looms are always busy, nevertheless. There is always preserved a staff of officers, the director, the chemist of dyes, and all that; and the tap.i.s.siers are careful workmen, with perfection, not haste, in view. The State directs the work, the State pays for it, the State consumes the products. That is the Republic's way of continuing the craft that was the serious pleasure of kings. But there is now no personal element to give it the vital touch. There is no Gabrielle d'Estrees, nor Henri IV; no Medici, no Louis XIV, no Pompadour. All is impersonal, uninspired.

Men who have worked in the deadening influence of the Gobelins declare that the factory cannot last much longer. But it is improbable that France--Republican France, that holds with bourgeois tenacity to aristocratic evidences--will abandon this, her expensive toy, her inheritance of the time of kings.

In the time of the Second Empire it was the fashion to copy, at the Gobelins, the portraits of celebrated personages executed by Winterhalter. The exquisite portrait of the beautiful Empress Eugenie by this delectable court painter has a delicacy and grace that is all unhurt by contrast with more modern schools of painting. But fancy the texture of the lovely flesh copied in the medium of woven threads, no matter how delicately dyed and skilfully wrought. Painting is one art, tapestry-making is entirely another.

But that is just where the fault lay and continued, the inability of the Gobelins ateliers to understand that the two must not be confused.

The same false idea that caused Winterhalter's portraits to be copied, gave to the modern tap.i.s.siers the paintings of the high Renaissance to reproduce. t.i.tian's most celebrated works were set up on the loom, as for example the beautiful fancy known as _Sacred and Profane Love_, which perplexes the loiterer of to-day in the Villa Borghese. Other paintings copied were Raphael's _Transfiguration_, Guido Rene's _Aurora_, Andrea del Sarto's _Charity_. There were many more, but this list gives sufficiently well the condition of inspiration at the Gobelins up to the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century.

Paul Baudry appeared at about this time striking a clear pure note of delicate decoration. The few panels that he drew for the Gobelins charm the eye with happy reminiscences of Lebrun, of Claude Audran, a potpourri of petals fallen from the roses of yesterday mixed with the spices of to-day.

But if the work of this talented artist ill.u.s.trates anything, it is the change in the uses of tapestries. The modern ones are made to be framed, as flat as the wall against which they are secured. In a word, they take the place of frescoes. The pleasure of touching a mobile fabric is lost. A fold in such a dainty piece would break its beauty.

Almost must a woven panel of our day fit the panel it fills as exactly as the wood-work of a room fits its dimensions.

The Nineteenth Century at the Gobelins was finished by mistakenly copying Ghirlandajo, Correggio, others of their time.

In the beginning of this century, the spirit of pure decoration again became animated. Instead of copying old painters, the Gobelins began to copy old cartoons. The effect of this is to increase the responsibility of the weaver, and with responsibility comes strength.

The models of Boucher, and the _Grotesques_ of Italian Renaissance drawing are given even now to the weavers as a training in both taste and skill. But better than all is the present wisdom of the Gobelins, which has directly faced the fact that it were better to copy the tapestries of old excellence than to copy paintings of no matter what alt.i.tude of art.

Modern cartoons are used, as we know, commanded for various public buildings in France, but the copying of old tapestries exercises a far happier influence on the weavers. If this is not an age of creation in art, at least it need not be an age of false G.o.ds, notwithstanding the seriousness given to distortions of the Matisse and post-impressionist school.

A careful copying of old tapestries--and in this case old means those of the high periods of perfection--has led to a result from which much may be expected. This is the enormous reduction in the number of tones used. Gothic tapestries of stained gla.s.s effect had a restricted range of colour. By this brief gamut the weaver made his own gradations of colour, and the pa.s.sage from light to shadow, by hatching, which was in effect but a weaving of alternating lines of two colours, much as an artist in pen-and-ink draws parallel lines for shading. Tapestries thus woven resist well the attacks of light and time.

To sum up the present att.i.tude of the Gobelins, then, is to say that the director of to-day encourages the education of taste in the weavers by encouraging them to copy old tapestries instead of paintings old or new, and in a reduction of the number of the tones employed. The talent of an artist is thus made necessary to the tap.i.s.sier, for shadings are left to him to accomplish by his own skill instead of by recourse to the forty thousand shades that are stored on the shelves of the store-room.

The manufactory at Beauvais, being also under the State, is a.s.sociated with the greater factory in the glance at modern conditions. Both factories weave primarily for the State. Both factories keep alive an ancient industry, and both have permission to sell their precious wares to the private client. That such sales are rarely made is due to the indifference of the State, which stipulates that its own work shall have first place on the looms, that only when a loom is idle may it be used for a private patron. The length of time, therefore, that must elapse before an order is executed--two or three years, perhaps--is a tiresome condition that very few will accept.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE ADORATION

Merton Abbey Tapestry. Figures by Burne-Jones]

[Ill.u.s.tration: DAVID INSTRUCTING SOLOMON IN THE BUILDING OF THE TEMPLE

Merton Abbey Tapestry. Burne-Jones, Artist]

Beauvais, with its low-warp looms, is more celebrated for its small pieces of work than for large hangings. The tendency toward the latter ended some time ago, and in our time Beauvais makes mainly those exquisite coverings for seats and screens that give the beholder a thrill of artistic joy and a determination to possess something similar. The models of Behagle, Oudry, Charron are copied with fidelity to their loveliness, and it is these that after a few years of wear on furniture take on that mellowness which long a.s.sociation with human hands alone can give. It is scarcely necessary to say that antique furniture tapestry is rare; its use has been too hard to withstand the years. Therefore, we may with joy and the complacency of good taste acquire new coverings of the Don Quixote or aesop's Fables designs for our latter-day furniture or for the fine old pieces from which the original tapestries have vanished.

ENGLAND

The chapter on Mortlake looms shows what was accomplished by deliberate importation of an art coveted but not indigenous. It is interesting to compare this with England's entirely modern and self-made craft of the last thirty years. I allude to the tapestry factory established by William Morris and called Merton Abbey. Mr.

Morris preferred the word arras as attached to his weavings, tapestry having sometimes the odious modern meaning of machine-made figured stuffs for any sort of furniture covering. But as Arras did not invent the high-warp hand-loom, nor did the Saracens, nor the Egyptians, it is but quibbling to give it arbitrarily the name of any particular locale.

It seems that enough can never be said about the versatility of William Morris and the strong flood of beauty in design that he sent rippling over arid ground. It were enough had he accomplished only the work in tapestry. It is not too strong a statement that he produced at Merton Abbey the only modern tapestries that fill the primary requirements of tapestries.

How did he happen upon it in these latter days? By worshipping the old hangings of the Gothic perfection, by finding the very soul of them, of their designers and of their craftsmen; then, letting that soul enter his, he set his fingers reverently to work to learn, as well, the secret of the ancient workman.

It was as early as 1885 that he began; was cartoonist, dyer, tap.i.s.sier, all, for the experiment, which was a small square of verdure after the manner of the Gothic, curling big acanthus leaves about a softened rose, a mingling of greens of ocean and shady reds.

Perhaps it was no great matter in the way of tapestry, but it was to Morris like the discovery of a new continent to the navigator.

His was the time of a so-called aesthetic school in England. Watts, Rossetti and Burne-Jones were harking back to antiquity for inspiration. Morris a.s.sociated with him the latter, who drew wondrous figures of maids and men and angels, figures filled with the devout spirit of the time when religion was paramount, and perfect with the art of to-day.

The romance of _The Holy Grail_ gave happy theme for the work, and three beautiful tapestries made the set. _The Adoration of the Magi_ was another, made for Exeter College, Oxford. Sir Edward Burne-Jones designed all these wondrous pictures, and the wisdom of Morris decreed that the _Grail_ series should not be oft repeated. The first figure tapestry woven on the looms was a fancy drawn by Walter Crane, called _The Goose Girl_.