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Updated: May 5, 2025
Brussels made her fame by haute-lisse, but in France the low-warp was dubbed "á la façon de Flandres"; and as Flanders stood for perfection, the weavers did their best to make the low-warp production approach in excellence the famed work of the ateliers to the north, which had formerly so prospered.
It is the black tracing on the warp with which high-warp weavers assist their work of copying the artist's cartoon. Where this is present, the work is of the prized haute lisse or high-warp manufacture, instead of the basse lisse or low-warp.
The looms on which tapestries are made are such as have been known as long as the history of man is known, but we have come to call them high-warp and low-warp, or as the French have it, haute lisse and basse lisse.
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.
Unused colours wound on the hundreds of flutes are dropped at the demand of the pattern, left in a rich confusion of shades to be resumed by the workmen at will; but the threads are not severed, if the colour is to be used again soon. Low-warp work is the same except for the weaver's position in relation to his work.
The manner of producing it varies in convenience to the operators, the low-warp being the easier, or at least the more convenient and therefore the quicker method. The cynic is ever ready to say that the tyrant living within a man declares only for those things which represent great sacrifice of time and effort on the part of other men.
He established three ateliers of high-warp under Jean Jans, Jean Lefebvre and Henri Laurent; also two ateliers of low-warp under Jean Delacroix and Jean-Baptiste Mozin. When charged with the decoration of Versailles he had under his direction fifty artists of differing scopes, which alone would show his power of assembling and leading, of blending and ordering.
It is a chair seat woven after the designs popular with Louis XV and his court, a plain background of solid colour on which is thrown a floral ornament. The loom was a small affair of the low-warp type, and was operated by a Frenchman who came to this country for the purpose of starting the craft on new soil.
In the celebrated periods of weaving the high loom has been the one in use, and to it is accredited a power almost mysterious; yet the work of the two styles of loom are not distinguishable by the weave alone, and it is true that the low-warp looms were used in France when the manufacture of tapestries was permanently established by the Crown about 1600.
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. Merton Abbey Tapestry. Merton Abbey Tapestry. Beauvais, with its low-warp looms, is more celebrated for its small pieces of work than for large hangings.
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