The Tapestry Book Part 11

Twenty-eight pieces composed the series, and they were drawn with that exquisite combination of romantic scenes and fields of pure decorative design that characterised the charm of the regence. In the centre of each piece (small pieces compared to those of Louis XIV) was a scene like a painting representing an incident from the adventure of the humorously pathetic Spanish wanderer; and this was surrounded with so much of refined decoration as to make it appear but a medallion on the whole surface. This set was so important as to be repeated many times and occupied the factory of the Gobelins from 1718 to 1794.

Charles Coypel was but twenty when he composed the first design for this suite. Each year thereafter he added a new design, not supplying the last one until 1751. But, while all honour is due Coypel, Audran and Le Maire and their collaborators must be remembered as having composed the borders, the pure decorative work which expresses the tender style of transition, the suggestive period of early spring that later matured into the fulsome Rococo. America is enriched by five of these exquisite pieces through Mr. Morgan's recent purchase.

But while artists were producing purity in art, those in political power were, with ever-increasing effect, plunging morals into the mud.

Philippe, the Regent, died, the corrupt Duke of Bourbon took the place of minister, and poor Louis XV was still but thirteen years old, and unavoidably influenced by the lives of those around him. Even the Gobelins was under the hand of the shallow Duke d'Antin. Yet even when the king matured and became himself a power for corruption, the artists of the Gobelins reflected only beauty and light. It is to their credit.

It is an ungrateful task to pick flaws with a period so firmly enthroned in the affections as that of the regence and the early years of the reign of Louis XV. The beauties of its pure decoration lead us into Elysian fields that are but reluctantly left behind. But the designs and tapestry weavers of that time left us two distinct cla.s.ses of production, and to be learned in such matters, the amateur contemplates both. This second style is ungrateful because it trains us away from art, delicate and ingenious, and plants us before enormous woven paintings.

Now it never had been the intention of tapestry to replace painting.

Whenever it leaned that way a deterioration was evident. It was by the lure of this fallacy that Brussels lost her pre-eminence. It was through this that the number of tones was increased from the twenty or more of Arras to the twenty thousand of the Gobelins. It was through this that the true mission of tapestry was lost, which was the mission of supplying a soft, undulating lining to the habitat of man, and flashes of colour for his pageants.

Under Louis XIV the pictures came thick and fast, as we have seen, but in deep-toned, simple colour-scheme. Now, with the De Cottes as directors at the Gobelins, and with a new reign begun, more pictures were called for.

The splendid _History of the King_ of Louis XIV could not be forgotten; the history of his successor must be similarly represented, and what could this be but a series of woven paintings. The flower of the time was an exquisitely complicated decoration on a small scale.

The larger expression was not spontaneous.

Louis XV, poor boy, was not old enough to have had many events outside the nursery, so it took imagination--perhaps that of the elegant profligate, Duke d'Antin--to suggest an occasion of appropriate splendour and significance. The official reception of the Turkish amba.s.sador in 1721 was the subject chosen, and under the direction of Charles Parrocel became a superb work, full of court magnificence of the day and a valuable portrayal to us of the boyhood of the king.

The same type of big picture was continued in the series of _Hunts of Louis XV_, lovely forest scenes wherein much unsportsmanlike elegance displays itself in the persons of n.o.ble courtiers. The Duc d'Antin favoured these and they were reproduced until 1745.

It is probable that the Bible fell into neglect in those days, too heavy a volume for pointed, perfumed fingers accustomed to no books at all. Bossuet, Voltaire, were they not obliged to set to the sonorous music of their voices the reforming and satirical attacks on manners and morals of the aristocrats at a time when books lay all unread? But at the Gobelins ateliers the Bible, wiped clean of dust, was much consulted for inspiration in cartoons. Charles Coypel dipped into the Old Testament, and Jouvenet into the New, with the result of several suites of tapestries of great elegance--all of which might much better have been painted on canvas and framed.

Charles Coypel, the talented member of a talented family of painters, also made popular the heroine _Armide_, who seemed almost to come of the Bible, since Ta.s.so had set her in his Christian _Jerusalem Delivered_. The seductive palace and entrancing gardens where Renaud was kept a prisoner, gave opportunity for fine drawing in this set.

[Ill.u.s.tration: HUNTS OF LOUIS XV

Gobelins, G. Audran after Cartoon by Oudry]

[Ill.u.s.tration: ESTHER AND AHASUERUS SERIES

Gobelins, about 1730. Cartoon by J. F. de Troy; G. Audran, weaver]

The Iliad of Homer came in for its share of consideration at the hands of Antoine and Charles Coypel, who made of it a set of five scenes. It was Romanelli, the Italian, who painted a similar set, a hundred years before, for Cardinal Barberini, which set came to America in the Ffoulke collection. After the death, in 1730, of the Duke d'Antin, that interesting son of Madame de Montespan, several directors had the management of the Gobelins in hand, the Count of Vignory and the Count of Angivillier being the most important prior to the Revolution. These were men who held the purse-strings of the state, and could thereby foster or crush a state inst.i.tution, but the direction of the Gobelins itself, as a factory, was in the hands of architects, beginning with the able De Cotte. As the factory had many ateliers, these were each directed by painters, among whom appear such interesting men of talent as Oudry, Boucher, Halle.

Although d'Antin was dead when it commenced, he is accredited with having inspired and ordered the important hanging known as the _History of Esther_. (Plate facing page 131.) The first piece, from cartoons by Jean Francois de Troy, was sent to the weavers in 1737, and the last piece, which was painted in Rome, was finished in 1742.

This set shows as ably as any can, the magnificent style of production of the period. It had from the beginning an immense popularity and was copied many times. Even now it is a favourite subject for those whose perverted taste leads them into the dubious art of copying tapestry in paints on cloth.

The serious accusation against this set, which in composition seems much like the tableaux in grand opera, is that it invades the art of painting. And that is the fault of woven art at that period. The decline in tapestry in Paris began when both weavers and painters struggled for the same results, the weavers quite forgetting the strength and beauty that were peculiar to their art alone.

This fault cannot be laid to the weavers only, who numbered such men as Neilson the able Scot, and Cozette, who, with wondrous touch, wove the set of _Don Quixote_; nor were the artists at fault, for they included such men as Audran and Boucher. No, it was the director who blighted and subverted talent, and the vitiated public taste that s.h.i.+fted restlessly and demanded novelty. The novelty that came in large hangings was a suppressing of the delicate subjects that delight the imagination by their playful grace, their a.s.sociation of human life with all that is gaily exquisite. The mode was for leaving the land of idealised mythology, for discarding the flowers, the scrolls, the happy loves and charming crew that lived among them, and for plunging into Roman history, real and ugly, enwrapped in drapings too full, c.u.mbered with forced accessory, or into such mythology as is represented in _Cupid and Psyche_. (Plate facing page 132.)

The _History of Esther_ ill.u.s.trates the loss of imagination sustained by the border which had come to be a mere woven imitation, in shades of brown and yellow, of a carved and gilded, wooden frame. At the close of the reign of Louis XV, borders were frankly abandoned altogether. Compare this state of things with the days when Audran and Coypel were producing the sets of _The Seasons_, _The Months_, and _Don Quixote_. It is aridness compared to talented invention.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CUPID AND PSYCHE

Gobelins Tapestry. Eighteenth Century. Design by Coypel]

[Ill.u.s.tration: PORTRAIT OF CATHERINE OF RUSSIA

Gobelins under Louis XVI.]

The top note of the imitation of painting was struck when the Gobelins set the task of becoming a portrait maker. (Plate facing page 133.) The work was done, it was bound to be, as royalty backed the demand.

Portraits were woven of Louis XV (to be seen now at Versailles), and his queen, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and others less well known. A better scheme for limiting the talent of the weaver could not have been suggested by his most ingenious enemy. He was a man of talent or his art had not reached so high, and as such must be untrammelled; but here was given him a work where personal discretion was not allowed, where he must copy tone for tone, shade by shade, the myriad indefinite blendings of the brush.

It is this practice, pursued to its end, that has made of the tapestry weaver a mere part of a machine, and tapestry-making a lost art, to remain in obscurity until weavers return to the time before the French decadence.

The temper of those who hold in their hands the direction of the people, these are the determining causes of the products of that age.

If d'Angivillier was responsible for displacing a transcendent art with a false one, if he routed a dainty mythology and its accessories with the heavy effort and paraphernalia of the Romans, on whom shall we place the entirely supportable responsibility of diminis.h.i.+ng tapestries from n.o.ble draperies down to mere furniture coverings?

The result came happily, with much fluttering of fans, dropping of handkerchiefs, with powder, patches, intrigues, naughty sports, and a general necessity for a gay company to divide itself into groups of four or two--a lady and a cavalier, forsooth--the inevitable man and maid. In the time of the preceding king, Louis XIV, the court lived in ma.s.ses. Life was a pageant, a grand one, moving in slow dignity of gorgeous crowds, but a pageant on which beat the fierce light of a throne jealous of its grandeur. No chance was here for sweet escape and no chance for light communing.

But all that saw a change. The needs of the lighter court and the lighter people, were for reminders that life is a merry dance in which partners change often, and sitting-out a figure with one of them is part of the game.

Perhaps the huge apartments were not to the taste of Regent Philippe, and certainly they were not convenient to the life of the king when he came to man's estate. So, down came the ceiling's height, and closer drew the walls, until the model of the Pet.i.t Trianon was reached and considered the ideal--if that were not indeed the miniature Swiss Cottage.

What place had an acre of tapestry in these little rooms? How could yards of undulating colour hang over walls that were already overlaid with the most exquisite low relief in wood that has ever been carved this side of the Renaissance in Italy? No place for it whatever. So, out with it--the fas.h.i.+ons have changed.

But there was the furniture. That, too, was smaller than hitherto. But this was the day of artists skilled in small design, and they must fill the need.

CHAPTER XIII

THE GOBELINS FACTORY (_Continued_)

And so it came about that tapestry fell from the walls, shrunk like a p.r.i.c.ked balloon and landed in miniature on chairs, sofas and screens.

How felt the artists about this domesticating of their art? We are not told of the wry face they made when, with ideals in their souls, they were set to compose chair-seats for the Pompadour. Her preference was for Boucher. Perhaps his revenge showed itself by treating the bourgeoise courtisane to a bit of coa.r.s.eness now and then, slyly hid in dainties.

The artist, Louis Tessier, appeased himself by composing for furniture a design of simple bouquets of flowers thrown on a damask background; but, with such surety of hand, such elegance, are these ornaments designed and composed, that he who but runs past them must feel the power of their exquisite beauty.

In this manufacture of small pieces the Gobelins factory unhappily put itself on the same footing as Beauvais and much confusion of the products has since resulted. The dignity of the art was lowered when the size and purpose of tapestries were reduced to mere furniture coverings. The age of Louis XV, looked at decoratively, was an age of miniature, and the reign that followed was the same. When small chambers came into vogue, furniture diminished to suit them, and not only were walls too small for tapestries to hang on, but chairs, sofas and screens offered less s.p.a.ce than ever before for woven designs, now preciously fine in quality and minutiae.

Tapestry weaving now entered the region of fancy-work for the drawing-room's idle hour, and we see even the king himself, lounging idly among his favourite companions, working at a tiny loom, his latest pretty toy. Compare this trifling with the att.i.tude of Henri IV and Louis XIV toward tapestry weaving, and we have the situation in a nutsh.e.l.l.

Louis XV pa.s.sed from the scene, likewise the charming bits of immorality who danced through his reign. However much we may disapprove their manner of life, we are ever glad that their taste sanctioned--more than that--urged, the production of a decorative style almost unsurpa.s.sed. To the artists belong the glory, but times were such that an artist must die of suppression if those in power refuse to patronise his art. So we are glad that Antoinette Poisson appreciated art, and that Jeanne Verbernier made of it a serious consideration, for, what was liked by La Pompadour and Du Barry must needs be favoured by the king.

When Louis XVI came to the throne, the return to antiquity for inspiration had already begun, but did not fully develop until later on, when David became court painter under Napoleon. Yet the tonic note of decoration was cla.s.sic. Designs were still small and details were from Greek inspiration. As tapestries were still but furniture coverings, this was not to be regretted, for nothing could be better suited to small s.p.a.ces, nor could drawing be more exquisitely pure and chaste than when copied from Greek detail.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHAIR OF TAPESTRY. STYLE OF LOUIS XV]

[Ill.u.s.tration: GOBELINS TAPESTRY (DETAIL) CRAMOISeE. STYLE LOUIS XV]

Count d'Angivillier kept the Gobelins factory from all originality, sanctioned only the small wares for original work, and forced a slavish copying of paintings for the larger pieces. It is not deniable that some beautiful hangings were produced, but the sad result is that pieces of so many tones lose in value year by year, through the gentle, inexorable touch of time; and, more deplorable yet, the ambition and the originality of the master-weavers was deprived of its very life-blood, and in time was utterly atrophied.

In the time of Louis XVI, when Marie Antoinette was in the flower of her inconsiderate elegance, the note of the day was for art to be small, but perfect; the worth of a work of art was determined by its size--in inverse ratio. It was a time lively and intellectual and frivolous, and its art was the reflection of its desire for concentrated completeness.

In the reign of Louis XVI ripened, not the art of Louis XIV, but the political situation whose seeds he had planted. The idea of revolution which started in the little-considered American colonies, took hold of the thinkers of France, even to the king of little power. But instead of being a theory of remedy for important men to discuss, it acted as a fire-brand thrown among the inflammable, long-oppressed Third Estate--with results deplorable to the art which occupies our attention.