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Updated: June 15, 2025
The lady-superintendent thereupon bent over her and heard these slowly uttered words: "About my husband, madame the shop is in the Rue Mouffetard oh! it's quite a tiny one, not far from the Gobelins. He's a clockmaker, he is; he couldn't come with me, of course, having to attend to the business; and he will be very much put out when he finds I don't come back.
Les Gobelins, the carpets of the Savonnerie, the porcelaine de Sèvres, were all, at her request, declared Manufactures Royales.
His designs broke from the limit of the Gobelins, and were woven at Beauvais with the care and skill required for proper interpretation of his land of mythology.
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.
The walls are hung with velvet brocade and rich silk, and panelled with four arazzi, enclosed in strips of gold embroidery. The tapestries are Gobelins, by Coypel, director of the Gobelin establishment. The China-room contains some splendid services, chiefly of Sèvres and Dresden.
We are not without looms, however. The first piece of tapestry woven in America to please the ethnologist we will grant that it was woven by Zuñi or Toltec or other aborigine. But the fabric approaching that of Arras or Gobelins, was woven in New York, in 1893, in the looms of the late William Baumgarten. It is preserved as a curiosity, as being the first.
Workers at the Gobelins numbered as many as two hundred fifty, and apprentices were legion. Ten or twelve important artists composed the designs for tapestries, yet the mind of Lebrun is seen to dominate all; his genius was their inspiration. It was he whose influence pervaded the decorative art of the day. More than any others in that grand age he influenced the tone of the artistic work.
A factory which lasted but a few years, yet has for us a special interest, is that of Maincy, founded in 1658. It is here that we hear of the great Colbert and of Lebrun, whose names are synonymous with prosperity of the Gobelins. For the factory at Maincy, Lebrun made cartoons of great beauty, notably that of The Hunt of Meleager, which now hangs in the Gobelins Museum in Paris.
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.
For the most part these fragments are the work of the Eighteenth Century. Older ones, with warmer colours introduced bring much higher prices. Those who hold by the letter, leave out the velvety product of La Savonnerie from the aristocratic society of hangings woven in the classic stitch of the Gobelins. They have reason.
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