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Updated: June 15, 2025
Colbert, then, although a Minister of State, head of the Army of France, and a few other things, had the fate of the Gobelins in his hand. As the ablest is he who chooses best his aids, Colbert looked among his countrymen for the proper director of the newly-organised institution. He selected Charles Lebrun. The very name seems enough, in itself.
The Gobelins factory wove several sets, and, the model becoming popular, it was copied many times in Brussels and elsewhere, often with distressing alterations in drawing, in border, and in colour. There were other suites produced at the Gobelins at this wonderful time of co-operation between Colbert, the minister, and Lebrun, the artist.
Making military expense an excuse, he turned his blighting hand toward the Gobelins and restricted the director, Lebrun, even to denying him the golden threads so necessary for the production of the sumptuous tapestries. And so for a time the productions of the looms lacked their accustomed elegance. Under Madame de Maintenon, the spirit of a morose religion pervaded the court.
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.
Opposite this house, among the trees of the boulevard, rose a great elm which was three-quarters dead; almost directly facing it opens the Rue de la Barriere des Gobelins, a street then without houses, unpaved, planted with unhealthy trees, which was green or muddy according to the season, and which ended squarely in the exterior wall of Paris.
The above figure gives but one intermediary tone in shading from one colour to another, which is the ancient method of working; at the present day the weavers in the Manufacture des Gobelins employ several other intermediary tones, thus allowing of finer gradation; possibly however these fine gradations are not of such great importance, and so need not have an unnecessary amount of attention and time devoted to their accomplishment.
Such airy beauty, such dainty conception, makes of the gods rulers of æsthetics, if not of fate. This series of Mantegna was the inspiration two centuries later of the Triumphs of the Gods, and similar hangings of the newly-formed Gobelins. Giulio Romano drew, among other cartoons, a set of Children Playing, which were the inspiration later at the Gobelins for Lebrun's Enfants Jardiniers.
When you have ascended the Rue Saint-Jacques, left the barrier on one side and followed the old inner boulevard for some distance, you reach the Rue de la Sante, then the Glaciere, and, a little while before arriving at the little river of the Gobelins, you come to a sort of field which is the only spot in the long and monotonous chain of the boulevards of Paris, where Ruysdeel would be tempted to sit down.
Compare this state of things with the days when Audran and Coypel were producing the sets of The Seasons, The Months, and Don Quixote. It is aridness compared to talented invention. Gobelins Tapestry. Eighteenth Century. The top note of the imitation of painting was struck when the Gobelins set the task of becoming a portrait maker.
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.
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