Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 15, 2025
At home and abroad the storehouses of curiosity merchants had been explored to beautify Lady Fareham's reception-rooms; and in the fading light Angela gazed upon hangings that were worthy of a royal palace, upon Italian crystals and Indian carvings, upon ivory and amber and jade and jasper, upon tables of Florentine mosaic, and ebony cabinets incrusted with rare agates, and upon pictures in frames of massive and elaborate carving, Venetian mirrors which gave back the dying light from a thousand facets, curtains and portieres of sumptuous brocade, gold-embroidered, gorgeous with the silken semblance of peacock plumage, done with the needle, from the royal manufactory of the Crown Furniture at the Gobelins.
It would seem a loss of ancient glory to shut down the Gobelins. Yet why does it live? It lives because a body of men have the patriotic pride to keep it alive. But as for its products, they are without inspiration, without beauty to the eye trained to higher expressions of art.
The magnificent tapestries of the Gobelins were borne as streamers, in frantic fury, along the boulevards; mischievous gamins were frolicking about in the long scarlet robes worn upon Court occasions, which they had filched from the Royal wardrobe; the escritoire of the King, the key having been found in a tea-cup, was ransacked, and private letters, books and the garments of ladies were strewn about the court and gardens of the Tuileries.
The King gave the Czar two magnificent pieces of Gobelins tapestry. He wished to give him also a beautiful sword, ornamented with diamonds, but he excused himself from accepting it.
Add to this, tapestries were the fashion. Every man of wealth and importance felt them a necessary chattel to his elegance. And add to this, too, that Mortlake had almost a clean field. It was nearly without rival in fine tapestry-making at that time. Brussels had declined, and the Gobelins was not formed in its inspired combination.
If I am a provincial or a peasant, I pay for maintaining an "Opera" which I never attend and for a "Sevres" and "Gobelins" of which I never see a vase or a piece of tapestry. In times of tranquility the extortion is covered up, but in troubled times it is nakedly apparent.
Other brief periods of perfection have been attained elsewhere, but Paris once establishing the art, has never let it drop, not even in our own day but that is not to be considered at this moment. Divers reigns of divers kings, notably that of Henri IV, fostered the weaving of tapestry and brought it to an interesting stage of development, after which Louis XIV established the Gobelins.
The models of Boucher, and the Grotesques of Italian Renaissance drawing are given even now to the weavers as a training in both taste and skill. But better than all is the present wisdom of the Gobelins, which has directly faced the fact that it were better to copy the tapestries of old excellence than to copy paintings of no matter what altitude of art.
Count d'Angivillier kept the Gobelins factory from all originality, sanctioned only the small wares for original work, and forced a slavish copying of paintings for the larger pieces.
This was the Hall of the Arras, a superb waiting-room with lofty painted ceiling and admirable Gobelins tapestry designed by Audran and representing the miracles of Jesus.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking