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Updated: June 4, 2025
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.
Jean Audran, once contractor for high-warp, then placed at the head of the factory, was arrested, but escaped with imprisonment only. During his absence he was replaced as head by Augustin Belle, whose respect for the Republic and for his head made him curry favour with the mob in a manner most deplorable.
There were many high-warp looms, and low-warp as well, in many towns in Flanders and France, and there were also beginnings in Spain, England and Germany. Italy came later. The superb set in the Cluny Museum in Paris, The Lady and the Unicorn, than which nothing could be lovelier in poetic feeling as well as in technique, is accorded to French looms.
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.
But in the new method the fabric leaves the loom intact. The determination of William Morris to catch old secrets by fitting his feet into old footsteps, led him to employ only the loom of the best weavers in the ancient long ago. The high-warp loom is the only one in use at the Merton Abbey works. America makes heavy demands for tapestries, but the art of producing them is not indigenous here.
It pleased Francis and perhaps the beautiful Diane de Poitiers and Duchesse d'Étampes to critique plays in that tiny gem of a theatre at the palace, or to feed the carp in the pool; but also it gave him pleasure to wander into the rooms where the high-warp looms lifted their utilitarian lengths and artists played at magic with the wools.
In 1302 a body of ten craftsmen formed a Corporation in Paris. The names of several workmen at Lille have been handed down to us. In 1318 Jehan Orghet is recorded, and in 1368, Willaume, a high-warp worker. Penalties for false work were extreme. One of the best known workers in France was Bataille, who was closely followed by one Dourdain.
From now on the old method is abandoned, not only in Brussels, but everywhere that the high-warp looms are set up. The "art nouveau" of that day influenced every brush and pencil. The great crowding of serried hosts on a single field disappeared, and fewer but perfect figures played their parts on the woven surface.
High-warp tapestry we have traced lightly from Egypt through Greece and Rome and, almost losing the thread in the Middle Ages, have seen it rising a virile industry, nursed in monasteries.
High-warp looms were those that made famous the tapestries of Arras in the Fifteenth Century, of Brussels in the Sixteenth, and of Paris in the Seventeenth, therefore it is not strange that they are worshipped as having a resident, mysterious power. To-day, the age of practicality, they scarcely exist outside the old Gobelins in Paris. But this is not the day of tapestry weaving.
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