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Updated: June 15, 2025
Pursuit of knowledge in regard to the Gobelins factory leads us through ways the most flowery and ways the most stormy, through sunshine and through the dark, right up to our own times. Collection of Wm. See Loriquet, "Les Tapisseries de Notre Dame de Rheims." Colbert saw the wisdom of taking direction for the king, Louis XIV, of the looms of Foucquet's château.
The cloth manufactures were dying out, they received encouragement; a Protestant Hollander, Van Robais, attracted over to Abbeville by Colbert, there introduced the making of fine cloths; at Beauvais and in the Gobelins establishment at Paris, under the direction of the great painter Lebrun, the French tapestries soon threw into the shade the reputation of the tapestries of Flanders; Venice had to yield up her secrets and her workmen for the glass manufactories of St.
So, as we have seen, new times and new modes caused the Gobelins to copy paintings instead of to interpret cartoons and there lay the destruction of their art. Instead of four-score tones, the dyers hung on their lines tens and tens of thousands.
The Gobelins uses for its reds, cochineal or the roots of the madder; for blue, indigo and Prussian blue; for yellow, the vegetable colour extracted from gaude. In America there is a specialist in dyes: Miss Charlotte Pendleton, who gives her entire attention to rediscovering the dyes of the ancients, the dyes that made a city's fame.
So little that historians of the future are going to find scant pickings for their record. The Gobelins factory being the last one to make a permanent contribution to art, the impulse is to ask what it is doing now. That is easily answered, but there is no man so optimistic that he can find therein matter for hope. France is commendably determined not to let the great industry die.
After visiting the Gobelins, passing through its many rooms, seeing here and there a half-finished piece of tapestry; and meeting a number of the members of the late Peace Congress, who, like myself had remained behind to see more of the beauties of the French capital than could be overtaken during the Convention week.
It met in the study of Stephane Pichon, the French Foreign Minister, which opened on to the garden of the French Foreign Office, and which, with its panelled walls, covered with gorgeous Gobelins picturing Ruben's story of Marie de' Medici, its stately brocaded chairs, and old-rose and gray Aubusson carpets, was redolent of old-time diplomacy.
Technical exactness, with classic motives, characterises his decorative work for the Gobelins. The Emperor was hot for throne-room fittings that spoke only of himself and of the empire he had built. David made the designs, beautiful, chaste, as his invention ever was, and dotted them with the inevitable bees and eagles.
It was furnished with an almost feminine delicacy of style, with wide-seated, spindle-legged Louis XV. chairs and a couch covered with rich brocade. The desk was a work of Boulle. A small tapestry of the Gobelins made a ragged glow of color on the wall. Frederic Fernand had recreated an atmosphere two hundred years old. He seated them at once.
All France was suffering under it, and in its name unbelievable horrors were perpetrated in every province. Paris was not too well informed of these to interfere with bourgeois life, but at court the hypocritical soul of Madame de Maintenon made self-righteousness a virtue. An almost laughable result of this pious rectitude was a certain order given at the Gobelins.
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