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Updated: June 15, 2025
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.
Louis Blamard was the director of the workmen, who were Flemish, and who were afterwards called to Paris to operate the looms of the newly-formed Gobelins, and the reason of the transference forms a part of the history of the great people of that day. Richelieu in dying had passed over his power to Mazarin, who had used it with every cruelty possible to the day.
The Gobelins works made at this time some of the most beautiful tapestries the world has known. The massive chimney-pieces were superseded by the "petite-cheminée" and had great mirrors over them or elaborate over-mantels. The whole air of furnishing and decoration changed to one of greater lightness and brilliancy.
The Gobelins was royally conceived as a source of supply for palaces and châteaux of royalty and royalty's friends.
It led to a spacious room, lighted with a gorgeous lamp that hung pendant in silver chains from the frescoed ceiling. The walls were richly tapestried with products of the looms of the Gobelins, representing the plains of Italy filled with sunshine, where groves, temples, and colonnades were pictured in endless vistas of beauty. The furniture of the chamber was of regal magnificence.
The Czar showed the same affection and the same attentions to the King as before; and his visit was not longer than the one he had received, but the crowd much surprised him. He had been at eight o'clock in the morning to see the Place Royal, the Place des Victoires, and the Place de Vendome, and the next day he went to the Observatoire, the Gobelins, and the King's Garden of Simples.
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.
The Sforza Castle at Milan had walls enough of tapestry, the pageants of Leonardo da Vinci, organised at royal command of the lovely Beatrice d'Este, displayed the wealth of woven beauty over which Francis had time to deliberate in those bad hours after the battle at Milan's noted neighbour, Pavia. Gobelins, Seventeenth Century. Cartoon after Poussin.
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.
He had founded the wonderful glass factories, and those of the Gobelins; he had raised, as though by a magic ring, the Royal Library over the gardens and galleries of Mazarin; and foreigners asked one another, in their surprise, what they must admire most in that monument, the interior pomp of the edifice or its rich collection of books, coins, and manuscripts.
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