The Recovery of the Netherlandish Tapestry Industry

The civil war that roiled the Netherlands for much of the last quarter of the sixteenth century gradually relented during the late 1590s and early 1600s, and with the truce of 1609 between the Catholic Netherlands and the United Provinces, the economy of both regions finally had an opportunity to recover. But as the merchants and weavers in the traditional centers of production in the southern Netherlands sought to reestablish the international scope of their businesses, it was clear that the monopoly they previously enjoyed was over. New workshops were flourishing in a number of Protestant towns, particularly the Delft workshop established by François Spiering. More generally, the tapestry industry experienced unprecedented levels of worker mobility. King Henry IV of France was enticing Flemish weavers to Paris to establish a large commercial industry, and other European rulers were also attempting to set up their own workshops, albeit for their own purposes. That of Duke Maximilian of Bavaria in Munich was especially noteworthy for the quality of its products.

During the early 1600s, the rulers of the Spanish Netherlands, Archdukes Albert and Isabella, took steps to stimulate the recovery of the tapestry industry in their dominion, particularly that of Brussels, by providing subsidies and commissions to the leading workshops and introducing legislation to discourage further emigration by skilled weavers. Many workshops continued to produce simplified versions of old designs. But a new development was signaled in 1616 in a series of cartoons by Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) that depicted the Story of Decius Mus. These scenes, conceived in terms of oil on canvas, introduced the character and drama of Baroque painting to the tapestry medium.

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The Paris Workshops

Following his accession, the French king Henry IV (r. 1594–1610) took steps to stimulate the French tapestry trade by legislating against the importation of Netherlandish tapestries, providing subsidies to existing workshops, and encouraging Netherlandish weavers to move to Paris. Of these migrants, the most notable were Marc Comans (1563–1644) of Antwerp and Frans van der Plancken (1573–1627) of Oudenaarde—later known as François de la Planche—who relocated to Paris in 1601. The ambitious scale of the king's vision is reflected by the royal charter issued to these master weavers in 1607 when it was agreed that they would maintain sixty looms in Paris at the Hôtel des Gobelins in the Faubourg Saint-Marcel and twenty more in Amiens. In return, the Flemings received generous subsidies and grants. At about the same period, Henry also reestablished some of the existing Paris workshops in custom-built premises in the Louvre Palace. During the following years, these workshops produced scores of tapestries for the French court and aristocracy.

One of the greatest challenges for the new Paris workshops was to find appropriate designs and cartoons. Late sixteenth-century artwork provided some models, and from the early 1600s a new repertoire was introduced by artists such as Henri Lerambert and Laurent Guyot. The continuing quest for new designs also led Comans and La Planche to commission a Story of Constantine series from Peter Paul Rubens in 1622. Finally, in 1626, Louis XIII (r. 1610–1643) recalled Simon Vouet (1590–1649) from Rome to provide tapestry designs and other decorative schemes. Vouet's work introduced an elegant classicism to French tapestry. Like the successful designers of the previous century, he produced his cartoons in collaboration with a team of artists, ensuring that they were well drawn, richly patterned, and visually engaging.

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The Mortlake Manufactory

Stimulated by the example of Henry IV, in 1619 the English king, James I (r. 1603–1625), founded a new manufactory at Mortlake on the outskirts of London. Ownership and direction were placed in the hands of Sir Francis Crane, a close associate of Charles, Prince of Wales, and it was staffed with Flemish weavers who were enticed to England in great secrecy. During its early years, Mortlake copied "old master" designs from the collection of Henry VIII and in 1623 Charles scored a significant coup when he purchased from Genoa seven of the famous Acts of the Apostles cartoons that Raphael had painted in 1516–17 for Pope Leo X. The first Mortlake set of this design was begun shortly after Charles became king in 1625, with allegorical borders designed by Franz Kleyn (1582–1658), subsequently known as Francis Clein, a German artist who moved to London in 1624 from the Danish court of Erik IV. Clein was appointed as official designer to the Mortlake works in 1626 and during the following decade he developed several new series of cartoons that were among the most ambitious exercises in the Baroque style yet attempted in England. Sir Francis Crane died in 1636 and shortly thereafter Charles assumed full responsibility for the costs of the manufactory which now became known as the King's Works. In the course of his reign, Charles spent comparable sums of money on Mortlake tapestries as on paintings by old masters and modern artists, the aspect of his patronage that has received more attention. The tapestries made at Mortlake during Charles' reign were equal in quality to the best products of Paris and Brussels, a fact that has been obscured by the decline of the Mortlake manufactory after the outbreak of the English civil war and the sale of the finest Mortlake tapestries to continental collectors after Charles' execution in 1649.

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Rubens and the Triumph of the Eucharist Series

Despite competition from new centers of production elsewhere in Europe, the Brussels workshops retained and consolidated a significant place in the international market during the second decade of the seventeenth century. A major part of the repertory consisted of copies of sixteenth-century cartoons, adapted with modern borders. Interestingly, despite the originality of his designs for the series Story of Decius Mus, Rubens did not receive any more commissions from the commercial tapestry workshops until the early 1630s, perhaps because of the technical difficulties that his painterly style presented to the weavers. Nonetheless, it was Rubens who was to make the most dramatic contribution to the next development of Baroque tapestry in the form of a commission undertaken for Archduchess Isabella sometime around 1626. This comprised the designs for a twenty-piece tapestry set depicting the Triumph of the Eucharist that Isabella wished to donate to the Convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid (to which she would have liked to retire after the death of her husband Albert in 1621). To speed completion of the set, the tapestries were woven by a consortium of workshops in Brussels, with a significant part of the set being ready for delivery to Madrid in July 1628. The twenty tapestries were conceived as a tromp l'oeil two-level gallery of columns from which hang depictions of tapestries containing the pictures in the series. Of the eleven wide pieces—the number was an allusion to the eleven weavings around the Ark of the Covenant—five have scenes of prefigurations from the Old Testament and six depict allegorical triumphs related to the Eucharist. As such, they form an explicit illustration of the mystery of the Transubstantiation—the real presence of God in the Eucharist—a central theme of the Roman Catholic Church in countering the Reformation.

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Tapestry in the Netherlands, 1630–1660

The Triumph of the Eucharist series was the most ambitious of the four tapestry series Rubens designed in the course of his career. In the following years, it stimulated a slew of imitations featuring dramatic figures in billowing costumes set within tromp l'oeil architectural frames and tapestries within tapestries. The first designer to pick up on the illusionist scheme of the Eucharist series was Jacob Jordaens (1593–1678) whose Scenes of Country Life, conceived sometime around 1626–27, depicted life-size figures in shallow architectural settings. In addition to the spontaneity and pleasurable illusionist effect of these designs, the architectural frames had the merit of being easier to weave than complex landscape grounds, a factor that was significant for the Brussels workshops that had no royal patrons and had to produce affordable tapestries for the marketplace.

For all their originality, Rubens' tapestry designs were essentially conceived as oil paintings, with tonal effects and challenging passages of aerial perspective that were difficult to reproduce in wool and silk. During the 1630s, 40s, and 50s, artists such as Jacob Jordaens, Jan van den Hoecke (1611–1651), Antoine Sallaerts (ca. 1590–1650), and Justus van Egmont (1601–1674) combined Rubens' innovations with a more considered approach to the requirements of the tapestry medium. Billowing drapery, architectural components, and floral borders all added to the decorative character and commercial appeal of the designs.

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Italian Tapestry Production, 1600–1660

Tapestry had long been a central component of the magnificence of the papacy and the Italian principalities, and during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries some of the richer and more visionary rulers had established their own workshops. Few outlasted the lives of the founding patrons, however, and the only workshop of size that survived into the late sixteenth century was that established in Florence in the mid 1540s by Cosimo de' Medici (r. 1537–74). This workshop enjoyed renewed prosperity in the late sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century under the patronage of Ferdinando I (r. 1587–1609), Cosimo II (r. 1609–21), Ferdinando II (r. 1621–70), and Cosimo III de' Medici (r. 1670–1723), producing tapestries for the Medici residences, particularly the Palazzo Pitti, and also for independent clients. Tapestries were obtained from a wide variety of artists working for the Medici dukes, and reflected the stylistic development of painting in Baroque Florence.

The Medici workshop was one of the examples that informed another Italian initiative taken in 1627 when Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), nephew of Pope Urban VIII, established a workshop in Rome, following a visit to France during which he received Paris tapestries as gifts from Louis XIII. Barberini corresponded with agents all over Europe to learn about the leading workshops of the day and the secrets of the dye stuffs used for their materials. This was not a commercial venture but rather a self-conscious alignment of Barberini patronage with that of the grandest maecenae, and tapestries from the Barberini workshop were reserved for the use of Francesco, his uncle Urban VIII, and members of their entourages. Designs were provided by Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669), Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (1610–62), and other artists in their circles.

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The Royal Gobelins Manufactory

Tapestry remained a vital component of European court splendor throughout the first half of the seventeenth century. The sale of the English royal collections by the Commonwealth government following the execution of Charles I in 1649 disseminated antique and modern tapestries of the highest quality across continental Europe, providing a further stimulus to the ambitions of the grandest patrons of the day. In France, Cardinal Mazarin (1602–1661) was an obsessive collector of tapestries, and during the 1650s he purchased many of the finest pieces previously owned by Charles I. This example may have played a part in the decision by Nicolas Fouquet (1615–1680), the French superintendent of finance under Louis XIV, to establish his own workshop in 1658 at Maincy under the direction of the talented and versatile painter Charles Le Brun (1619–1690), to produce tapestries for his nearby château of Vaux-le-Vicomte. Following Fouquet's arrest in 1661, the king's new minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83), relocated Le Brun and the Maincy workers to the Paris workshops at the Hôtel des Gobelins. Here they were united with weavers from the preexisting workshops, with the express purpose of creating magnificent tapestries for the palaces of Louis XIV. The new manufactory was titled the Manufacture Royale de Tapisserie de Gobelins. Subsequently, Colbert added workshops for other decorative arts at the same site and the enterprise was renamed the Manufacture Royale des Meubles de la Couronne. Working from designs executed by Le Brun and a team of assistants, the Gobelins workshop produced sumptuous allegorical and historical subjects that glorified the French king by analogy, comparison, and overt triumphalist portrayal. Benefiting from royal funding and the combined efforts of the most skilled artists and weavers in the country, the tapestries produced at Gobelins during the following three decades are as fine as any tapestries ever produced.

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The Beauvais Manufactory

In 1664, shortly after Colbert established the Gobelins manufactory, he also founded a new tapestry enterprise at Beauvais, a town forty miles to the north of Paris, as part of the broad economic initiative that the young Louis XIV was then launching. The Beauvais enterprise was intended to complement the Gobelins manufactory by serving the needs of wealthy private customers. Smaller initiatives in the towns of Aubusson and Felletin were also organized in 1665 to produce weavings for the middle- and low-end markets. The first director of the Beauvais workshops, Louis Hinard (doc. 1639–97), was a master weaver from Oudenaarde, and Colbert created generous incentives and grants to encourage other weavers and cartoonists to move to Beauvais from the southern Netherlands. By 1665 there were already 127 Flemings working there, alongside a similar number of French weavers. During the early years of production, the Beauvais manufactory produced many verdure and landscape tapestries, most of mediocre quality, which are often difficult to distinguish from Flemish products. Despite royal subsidies and commissions, Hinard faced severe financial troubles and resigned in 1684 to be replaced by another Fleming, Philippe Behagle (1641–1705), also of Oudenaarde. Behagle instigated several changes to improve the factory's products, broaden its marketability, and increase revenue. Most important, he was responsible for commissioning several highly decorative cartoon series from French court artists such as Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (1636–1699), Guy-Louis Vernansal (1648–1729), and Jean-Baptiste Belin de Fontenay (1653–1715), which were sold to patrons throughout Europe and which introduced a lighter, more decorative spirit to the Beauvais repertory.

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Tapestry Production in Brussels

The richness and status of the tapestry collection at the French court during the 1660s, 70s, and 80s—which has never been equaled—set an example that profoundly influenced tapestry usage and production throughout Europe for years to come. The principal beneficiaries of the ongoing demand for tapestry, other than the Gobelins and Beauvais manufactories, were the Brussels workshops. As in previous eras, these continued to dominate high-quality production in the Netherlands, marketing their wares widely all over Europe. The large-figure histories and mythologies designed by Peter Paul Rubens, Jacob Jordaens, Justus van Egmont, and their contemporaries fell out of fashion during the 1660s, partly as a result of the new style of design that Le Brun was pioneering in Gobelins production. They were displaced by a demand for more elegantly drawn figures in richer landscape settings, such as those being created by Charles Poerson (1609–67) and Lodewijk van Schoor (ca. 1650–1702), or literal copies of Le Brun designs. Beginning in the 1690s, the Brussels workshops enjoyed something of a second Renaissance, providing large, high-quality history and mythological series to rich patrons throughout Europe. Scenes of military life by Lambert de Hondt (ca. 1650–1708) and Philippe de Hondt (1663–1740) and mythological scenes by Victor Janssens (1658–1736), Jan van Orley (1665–1735), and Augustin Coppens (1668–1740) were especially popular and continued to provide fashionable decoration for the grand reception rooms of palaces and country houses around Europe until well into the 1730s. Genre scenes inspired by the paintings of David Teniers the Younger (1610–1690) enjoyed equal success for more intimate settings. For lower-quality products, European patrons often looked closer to home, and during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries workshops flourished in a number of European cities, including London, Dresden, and Berlin. Many of the workers engaged at these workshops were French Huguenots, who fled France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685.

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