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JUNE 14, 2010
TEXTILE MUSEUM ANNOUNCES NEW DIRECTOR
At a luncheon meeting with Hajji Baba(New York City Rug Club) members on June 5th, the TEXTILE MUSEUM announced the appointment of Maryclaire Ramsey as Director of the TEXTILE MUSEUM, Washington, D.C, With her introduction Ms. Ramsey presented a film outlining upcoming exhibitions. Look for previews of those exhibits here. The host collection (Roger and Claire Pratt, Far Hills, New Jersey) contained textiles and rugs from most areas as seen below
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New Textile Museum Director and Eastern Hemisphere Curator
CU. SUZANI - Clarke Collection
Joe Dougherty / Gail Martin
SEE The FRAGMENTS (top of LARGE RUGS) of ISFAHAN CLASSICAL CARPETS
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Athough three weeks old, here are some results from Christie’s (Rockefeller Plaza) Auction , 500 YEARs of Decorative Arts including carpets from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. November 24, 2009.All of the ISFAHAN 17th c. carpets from the William Clark bequest sold. Most sold well; some at more than twice their high estimate. One, #130, sold for $254,000 :(178,000Euros) .more than three times its high estimate This carpet was well covered in carpet literature. The carpet has a very fine foundation , silk warped, enabling a most intricate design. The dark blue ground palmette figured border, surrounding the deep rose field, is glorious. The provenance is impressive - the owner prior toAmbassador Clarke was Lord Frederick Leighton, the pre-Raphaelite artist whose house with its splendid collection of near Eastern tiles became London’s Leighton House Museum. Perhaps the new owner is a museum who will show this great example of carpet art to a large public. Following is a description of these Isfahan Classical Carpets in this Christie’s Sale. |
The big rug event in New York City is the auction of Isfahan
Classical Carpets at CHRISTIE'S on November 24, 2009\A major rug
event in New York will be Christie's November 24 th
auction - 500 years Decorative Arts Europe - .An amazing group of carpets from the Corcoran Gallery of
Art in Washington is included…among them are
fifteen 17 th c Isfahan
carpets with early provenance from Italian dukes , English lords, a
Portuguese prince, later in the collection of a United States Senator from
Montana , William Andrews Clark.
The catalogue's introduction says this is the largest
group of classical Isfahan carpets to appear on the
auction market in recent history. These stunning carpets of finely knotted
wool and silk stand at the pinnacle of Safavcarpet
weaving. During the reign of Shah Abbas Isfahan became the capital of Persia and the royal
manufactories established there produced carpets for the Persian nobility , for export and for diplomatic gifts.A number of these were collected by Senator William
Andrews Clark in the early 1900s and many were installed on the walls of his
Fifth Avenue mansion, presenting them as great works of art. Those of us who
attended ARTS in San Francisco in October and
who were fortunate to see Jim Dixon's home built in Sonoma County
to his own design specifically to house his carpet collection had perhaps a
similar experience. There at Mr. Dixon's the beauty of his antique and
classical carpets hung border to border in room after room, level afterlevel, was an unforgettable experience. The Clark
collection was donated to the Corcoran after Clark's death in 1925.These
carpets, most of which are considered to be “'in a wonderful state of
preservation”, have been written about extensively by Richard Ettinghausen, Kurt Erdmann, M.S. Dimand
and Jean Mailey. Some were shown in exhibition at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1910. The major dealer redited
with the sale of many of these Isfahan carpets to Senator
Clark, Vitall Benguiat,
had a large collection himself. Clark gifted
many of the European decorative arts in this auction to the Corcoran Gallery
as well as the Isfahans and other carpets.
Woven in wool and silk, most have clear claret floral
filled central fields and wide vivid palmette
figured borders. One with a camel field and a “Polonaise” with a pale field
are exceptions. Most, perhaps all, are in fine
condition. #131 is stated as having almost full pile with full original color
#30 for sale at Christie's is shown here. This is a rare “strapwork” carpet, an Isfahan subgroup
of whichapparently only seven are known. The
beautiful dark blue vinery entwining the motifs creates the “strapwork”.The estimate for this carpet is $30-50,000.
The estimates on the Isfahans range from bottom of
$15,000 to top of $120,000 (#31: 22' long has a deep emerald bracketed leaf
border ###  Other impressive carpets in the catalogue are a
charming ivory field red arabesque Bidjar, a number
of stately Heriz, south Caucasian runners including
a pretty Seychour. All of these seem to be priced modestly;
some are not from the Clark donation.
The carpets are on exhibit starting November 20 th .
Tel: +1 212 636 2200]
Sag Harbor NY November 8, 2009
February 2008
NOMADIC LEGACY - Tents and
Textiles of Central Asia and Iran
NOMADIC LEGACY currently at the Escondid
branch of the MINGEI
MUSEUM boasts a really
grand YURTi
 Woman's Robe, late 19th Century© Courtesy of Mingei International Museum
This Kyrgyz round trellis tent built by the Osmonaliev family is not the ordinary yurt one would come upon on the steppes
of the Kyrgyz or near the Amu Darya River with the Uzbeks. The
organization of it is traditional; opposite theentrance
at the rear are stacked the flat-woven rugs, the storage bags
, bedding, all covered with a kilim . This
is the focal point, in front of which entertaining and dining takes place.
Womens ' equip-ment
for cooking and weaving and other tasks is on the right after entering. Mens ' guns, ritual coffee makers, whatever is hung on
the left of the entrance
The finely carved entrance of this fine yur t is unusual and thepresence
of chiy (wool-wrapped reed screens) are unique
to theKyrgyz among the pastoral nomads of this broad
band of Asia .The reed screens, which
provide covering and decoration for the walls near the entrance. were provided by Dr. Fred and Stella Krieger of Los Angelesas were some of the sumptuous ikat
robes (see woman's robe above ) andhead gear.
Other chapans and chalats . the most
prized of which are in silk velvet,,were loaned by
Dr. David Reisbord from his extensive collection.
From Turkmenistan
are a group of chyrpys ; the embroidered outer garment
of Turkmen women, worn high over the headgear and prescribed by color; a rich
yellow for elderly women, white for married women and black for unmarried
girls.
For all you bag collectors out there ,
this exhibit includes a wall of stunning saddle bags and bag faces, all
Persian, The one shown below was donated by Alice and Leslie Orgel of La Jolla . It
is shown below; the front of a double bag, AFSHAR, late 19 th c, wool knotted pile, goat hair tassels
.
Valerie Justin Sag Harbor NY
March 20,2009
Radiance
From the Rainforest, the Metropolitan Museum
of Art through 1 September 2008
Review by Valerie Justin,
Vanishing Textiles
Chimu tabard (Peru,
South Coast)
Metropolitan Museum of Art
Gorgeous garments and accoutrements from pre conquest
South America fashioned from the brilliantly colored feathers of birds from
the Amazonian rain forests, are currently shown in
the Michael Rockefeller wing of the Metropolitan Museum
in NYC. Titled “RADIANCE FROM THE RAINFOREST- Featherwork
in Ancient Peru” this exhibit covers different cultures and different areas
from the very early (6th-1st BC) Paracas culture on
the Pacific South Coast through Nasca and Huari cultures to the Chimu
whose leaders ruled over a large area on Peru's North Coast and whose
feathered textiles were , according to archeological
finds, used extensively (10th-15th c). Among the exhibits are a number of
miniature groupings. A delightful funerary procession consists of an oval
casket and an intricate litter supported by silver posts from the Chancy
culture.
In the current issue of HALI #156 Heidi King, curator of
the exhibit, shows 13 pieces from the total of 70 in the exhibit. Her
discussion puts these in context through spare written records and
archeological evidence, much of it from late 19th and 20th century
excavations.
The last pre conquest rulers, the Inca, left in burial
tombs miniature figures dressed not “to the gills” but in feathers: garments
and important head gear as offerings to the gods. A delightful funerary
procession from the Chancy culture consists of an oval casket and an
intricate litter supported by silver posts. Earlier works are of human size –tabards
(tunics) and head dresses, probably used for “the elite to display on festive
occasion since feathers like precious metals, shells and coloured
stones were highly valued for their magnificent colours
and silken texture”
As you can see in the photo of the Chimu
tabard (Peru, South Coast) the blue and yellow are
feathers from the MACAW (also scarlet and red-and-green). Other common
feathers are from Parrots, Flamingos and Egrets.
These splendid feathers were transported across the Andes to the Pacific where feathered cloth was made by
trained artisans. Sewing strings of feathers on to woven cloth (of cotton and
camilid hair) in overlapping horizontal rows was
one method explained by Ms. King. Other techniques (looping and use of single
knots) as well as gluing small birds' feathers in mosaic were used.
Two textiles at the Metropolitan are not of feather work
but are part of the feather work culture. One is a woven tunic painted with
tropical birds from the Chimu where painted cotton
textiles were the style.
Tunic (16-17c) Tapestry
Woven
Metropolitan Museum
of Art
Metropolitan Museum.The second
is a beautiful tapestry woven tunic (small, perhaps for a child,from the colonial period,16th or early 17th c.)
The panels at the bottom half of the garment consist of small boxed motifs
somewhat like tapestry-woven designs from the Eastern hemisphere. But the
panels on both sides of the upper section consist of repeated identical
feather motifs (certainly not tapestry motifs in the ‘old' world). This small
tunic (called uncu) is as fine as the better known
colonial tapestries made for Spanish conquistadors and officials (the Boston
Museum of Art has published a large collection of these).
It is the Western Hemisphere aspect of the featherwork that makes them unique; during the period of
discovery the American landscape (particularly South
America) captured the imagination not just of navigators and
naturalists but of artists and the literati. These magnificent works of
feather art reverberate with the creative spirit of the artisans of the Americas.
Valerie Justin, Vanishing
Textiles ,
August 20, 2008, Sag Harbor,
New York
ISFAHAN SELLS FOR $3,900,000 AT
CHRISTIE'S, BREAKING AUCTION RECORD FOR CARPETS
A magnificent Isfahan silk
carpet, circa 1600, sold for $3,900,000 on June 2nd, 2008. This carpet,,
7'7"x5'7" , from the Doris Duke collection, has been known in the
United States since 1930 and was included in the Arthur Upham
Pope/Phyllis Ackerman work, A SURVEY OF PERSIAN ART. "Nothing further in
the way of refinement, imagination, perfection of technique, or infinite
charm of color, was produced in this period."referring
to the apex of Safavid art during the reign of Shah
Abbas (1587-1629)
HERE is its image from the
Christie's catalogue.
 [fragment 1711a. size : 50" x
17"]
From one of (Safavid)
Persia's great ancient centers,
we present two very rare fragments from the border of a MAGNIFICENT 17th
century ISFAHAN
carpet. Four hundred years old with glorious colors and heartthrob motifs,
1711a is 50"X17" . 1711b. is
20"X40". Each is $1000.
ARCHITECTURAL TEXTILES; TENT BANDS OF CENTRAL ASIA
The opening sentences to the brochure
for this marvellous exhibit reads "The
trellis tent is a brilliant invention. In its present form, it has made
nomadic life possible across Central Asia
for at least one and a half millennia". The trellis tent, or yurta, its most common name among the Turkic peoples
across Central Asia who inhabit it, does not actually apear
in the galleries at the Textile Museum ( 2320 S Street,
NW, Washington, DC
)although a charming table-top Kirghiz
yurta accompanied by miniature Kirghiz and
their herd animals is in the exhibit. A short Video from the Mingei Museum in San Diego
shows the entire process of construction, demonstrated by a group of Kirghiz tribespeople whose yurta's
components are spectacular; its tent bands and appliqued
felts, its reed screens and its tasseled ties.
The people who occupy the
trellis tents are pastoral people, nomadic and semi-nomadic, Turkmen, Karakalpak, Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Uzbek; they weave carpets,
saddle and tent bags as well as the tent bands that provide the material for
this stunning exhibit. Richard Isaacson, the Curator, drew on the Textile Museum's
own holdings for about 1/3 of the bands; the remainder come from private
collections in the US and Europe. He conducted three tours on opening day. First
he showed a few pile weavings -bag faces from a variety of Turkmen tribes,
and discussed the difficulty of relating the bags and carpets of specific
tribes to specific tent bands. In that long gallery a half dozen or more
horizontally mounted tent bands were labelled;
materials, size and origin provided --.but Isaacson carefully added a question
mark after every attribution. indicating the
difficulties of attribution even after a great amount of study and
comparison.
Where on the yurta the tent bands' functions are both as critical
elements bracing the walls against collapse AND as decorative objects in the
culture of their peoples, here they function as a dramatic visual treat and
provide an intense indroduction into their ethnic,
aesthetic and technical aspects. Tent bands from Central
Asia are woven in several different structures. Isaacson has
divided them into three groups; flatwoven, pile and
mixed technique. While he discussed the technique of the pile weavings,
particularly the highly prized pile designs on plain weave grounds,
he discussed the flatweaves in terms of their
intricate design elements. There he discoursed on their repeats and
variations as in a musical composition. This provided him and the listeners
with the ability to look at the at-first confusing changes and repeats in
terms of the symmetry and placement; all of which made the experience
pleasantly intense. On the website here (vanishingtextiles.com) look at #733
Turkmen ghujeri tent rug (in Medium Rugs). Try
counting the design motifs and the repeats of their juxtapositions - for a
brain buster.
A special group of tent
bands, ceremonial in nature, and kept carefully to be passed on by the
generation, are records of the wedding ceremony (see detail of one above).
One gallery called
"Transformations" showed ways in which sections of tent bands were
reassembled into other useful textiles; rugs or covers or hangings in the
conservative manner of peoples who do not throw away the usable portions of
anything that is part of their spare existence. Creative patchwork has always
cast its spell on me, for one. Look at our ghujeri
#2010 in Large Rugs. It is Uzbeki ahd has ten bands of which 4 are different treatments of
diamond designs, 3 have different shaped, different sized extended hook
motifs and the others are unrelated. These unschooled women weavers are
certainly up on their geometry. Our Ersari Turkmen
tent rug #1078, also in Large Rugs, contains solid bands of colors with
jagged edges alternating with plain weave white bands which heighten the
drama. Tent bands are approximately 40' in length, the size of the trellis tent's
circumference where they are placed facing the interior, under the felt outer
covering. The horizontal loom, staked to the ground extends from the interior
where the weaver sits, out beyond the tent as is necessary. I do not remember
as I write this if the bands for the ghujeri are
chosen from a stock of band material made for that purpose of if they are
pieces unused in a planned tent band. If you are interested, stay tuned.
Congratulations to the Textile Museum and to Richard Isaacson for a
brilliant job. A catalogue is planned; I hear there will be fold-outs to show
the horizontality of the tent bands.
Valerie
Justin.
April 1, 2007
Matisse, The Fabric of Dreams: His Art and His
Textiles
At the 9th ICOC (International Conference on Carpets in
1999. a large exhibit showed Classical paintings from Italian collections,
each accompanied by detailed analysis of the Oriental Rugs in the paintings.
In 400 years from now, if there are paintings from the
20th century to look at, what will be said about the textiles in
Matisse’s paintings? If records of the exhibit Matisse, The Fabric of
Dreams: His Art and His Textiles; and its Catalogue are still extant, they
will reveal that the textiles so omnipresent in Matisse’s paintings are
not there simply as rich embellishment but are the font, the reservoir from
which is drawn Henri Matisse’s art.
The Exhibit shows groups of textiles, hanging, close to
the related paintings. Although all labeled from “private
collection”; they are textiles that belonged to Matisse himself,
re-collected from many sources by the curators. It is easy to identify the
textiles in the paintings, loose but unquestionably replicates. Many appear
in their entirety. The textile designs are not used to become something else
(it is prevalent these years for fashion and home designers to use kilim and oriental rug motifs as patterns in their
shirting and upholstery fabric) .
A purple and white caftan (identified as Ottoman, 19th c)worn
by the seated woman in ‘Purple Robe and Anemones’, painted in
1937, is proudly itself. A velvet jacket appliquéd with gold trim
(‘Ottoman or Moroccan’) is found in one of the gorgeous Odelisque paintings (the ‘Seated Odelisque’ from the Cone Colllection
at the Baltimore
Museum).
Matisse was born into the life of textiles. Born to a
weavers’ family in northeastern France, he grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, a center of textile production
highly regarded for its luxury silks and taffetas. Generations of Matisses had earned their living at the loom. “He
grew up on a block surrounded by weavers; embroiders’ and
designers’ workshops, and among people preoccupied with finding fresh
ways of combining and exploring colors.” Contemporary accounts agreed
in the supremacy of “the Bohain
weavers’, delicacy and richness of their colors, their unerring sense
of design and their insatiable appetite for experiment” Fine French
furnishing fabrics are in Matisse’s collection and in the paintings.
It is interesting to know from a chapter in the
book/catalogue written by Hilary Spurling, the
chief curator of the exhibition, that
Matisse’s art education was in great contrast to the open-mindedness
found in textile production. At the Academy drawing was taught like a dead
language, use of color forbidden. In the weavers’ workshops, on the
contrary, individuality was highly prized. I suggest that Matisse’s
visual sophistication was both genetic and environmental.
There are fine French furnishing fabrics in Matisse’s
collection and they appear in some of the paintings. Among the textiles in
the largest display in the first gallery are a 1760 Toile de Jouy printed cotton, a 19th c otton
ikat identified as possibly French provencal, a Javanese Batik, a Morccan
silk sash and an embroidered silk. But I feel that his major textile loves
were North African, African (Congo Kuba cloths) and
Polynesian.
Very dramatic in the galleries were a pair of Moroccan
transparent lattice screens with prayer rug mihrab
designs. They were made of colored cottons appliquéd to a
burlap and pierced to resemble fretwork screens common throughout the
Islamic world. When shown in front of a window they make shadows and
intricate surfaces as in several of the paintings. Islamic design, calligraphy
and arabesques appear throughout.
Kuba raffias,
woven by men in the Republic of the Congo from the raffia palm leaf
and embroidered with dyed raffia by women, were signs of wealth and standing
(smaller pieces were used as units of currency). Such Kuba
raffias adorned the walls of Matisse’s Villa
where he moved to Nice in World War two. He had purchased them, known as
African velvets, when they were in vogue in Paris in the 1920s. Their designs appear in
many paintings. In his studio Matisse juxtaposed the Kuba
clothes with bark cloth brought back from his 1930s trip to the South Seas. Two large pieces of this work are in one of
the galleries. (the cloth known as Tapa was the bark of breadfruit or mulberry trees, soaked
and pounded and covered with strips of raised designs.) Matisse said he could
look at them for hours pondering the mysteries of their instinctive geometry.
A remarkable result of that Polynesian trip was perhaps
the triumph of Matisse’s last art, the magnificent paper cutouts.
The cutouts feature free form sea anemones, fish and other water creatures,
waves, leaves that float on vivid blocs of brilliant colors and became the
most direct way Matisse developed to express himself. Two huge tan and white
silk screened works (Algae 1947) filled a wall of the final room in the
exhibition shared with the ecclesiastic copes Matisse designed for the famous
Chapel of the Rosary in Vence in southern France. His
copes with their minimal motifs
and startling color contrasts remind me of the early Byzantine vestments I
saw at the Hermitage
Museum in St. Petersberg.
As for actual carpets, I found that an Algerian rug, most
probably a kilim, figured in several paintings. It
had a wide red border with minimized garland motif and a black field with
just suggestions of flower heads. I found one (1924) in “Interiors
Flowers and Parakeets”. Another appears in “Dishes and Fruit on a
Red & Black Rug”. This was bought by Schulkin,
the Russian textile magnet, in 1906 and is now in the Hermitage. Catalogue
#19
Schulkin was one of the largest Matisse
collectors. It is nice to think of Matisse and Schulkin
discussing rugs and paintings and their interconnections. Another painting
bought by Schulkin, now also in the Hermitage, the
1923 “The Painter’s Family”, contains a carpet that was
possibly a Heriz.
A rug in a painting from the Philadelphia Museum
was a dark colored runner partly covering a large orange carpet whose origin
I was unable to place.
Another rug, in “Piano and Checker Players”
(1924), looking most like a Balkan kilim, was also
a Schulkin possession.
Early critics talked about Matisse’s revolutionary
art “He confused two senses; the art of the painter and the art of the
tapestry-maker” (1910-Jean Francois Scherb)”Matisse’s
painting in a gallery furnish the walls in sumptuous fashion and match the
tonalities of the handsomest carpets”(Michael Puy).
Apparently the great appreciation of carpets came to
Matisse after a famous Munich exhibit which he visited in October of 1910
– at the end of his life he said of those masterpieces of
‘Mohammedan art’ “revelation thus came to me from the
Orient”.
Matisse also said, toward the end of his life, that in the
Odelisque paintings (studies of scantily and
exotically dressed women) the textiles were as important as the models. He
layered the textiles to create a tension and then softened them to convey
“the impression of happy colors – a balance of deliberately
massed riches”.
“Matisse’s lifelong love of colored cloth came
wide awake once he realized its potency for modern painting, a discovery that
proved as fecund, in its way, as Picasso’s of African
sculpture….Matisse played the ambiguity between pattern and a picture
of a pattern, setting up resonances of color so strong that you seem to hear,
feel, taste and small them” (Peter Schjeldahl,
New Yorker)
The textiles shown in the exhibit are good looking, some
very fine, examples in their categories. They are
not knock-out pieces. There are no carpets; great carpets can be seen right
there at the Met in the Islamic galleries. This exhibit of the art of Henri
Matisse demonstrates the relationship of inspiration and creativity. The
inspiration Matisse derived from the patterns, designs, and cultures of
diverse peoples empowered him to create these great works.
Until September 25th 2005. Metropolitan Museum of Art,
NYC
Matisse, The Fabric of Dreams His Art and His Textiles
Book is available in hardcover or paperback at the Museum or discounted at
Amazon.com
Valerie Justin.
Sag Harbor. September 2005
GIANT LEAF TAPESTRIES OF THE RENAISSANCE 1500-1600
A group of Verdure tapestries called Giant Leaf Tapestries
is being shown in New York City.
The tapestries are possibly the earliest renderings of the newly discovered
great forested landscapes of the New World.
To see these exuberant tapestries hanging in a Manhattan brownstone is to
enter into the fantastic once-upon-a-time landscape that was the Americas
circa 1500.The great curling blue green/light green leaves massed against mysterioso dark backgrounds dominate the space - looking
carefully one sees exotic birds; parrots, wild turkeys and herons, vines are
entangled in the dentated or serrated leaves, wild
roses are central in several of the pieces. In “Giant Leaf tapestry
with serrated leaves and hounds” two elegant hounds are Old World dogs and might have actually accompanied the
original explorers. The explorers, (could the artist have been among them?),
also noted leaves torn and damaged by the feeding insects and snails shown in
natural detail in several of the tapestries.
Giant Leaf Tapestries were acquired by the rulers of England and Europe.
Inventories of Henry VIII show he owned sets in every palace, as did the
Roman Emperor Charles V. Being in a grand hall in candlelight. its walls completely covered with these powerful natural
images, would have been dramatic - creating the experience of being enclosed
in a primeval forest. They were first woven in the early 1500s after Vasco de
Gama and Christofo
Colombo had brought fauna and flora from the Americas
to Europe causing an explosion of interest
in botany and spawning the study and understanding of the medicinal
properties of plants, and wide interest in their cultivation.
The absence of historic and religious subjects, the
naturalism of these scenes, and the accuracy of their observation changed the
treatment of subject matter in tapestry design. Replacing the more formal
“mille fleur” depictions of frame-filling flowers, proto Giant
Leaf Tapestries appeared; a charming one in the exhibit shows a
confrontational lion and griffin of medieval appearance.
These tapestries are not marked with makers’ names
and there are no extant drawings (the cartoons) – specific knowledge of
their birth seems still elusive. They are woven with wool and silk. The warp
count is given as between 11 and 16 threads to the inch.
The exhibition includes complete examples (the longest
shown is 13’1” but is only 4’5” wide because it was
woven as a wainscot tapestry to cover a wall above the paneling). Also
included are fragments from large tapestries that had been altered for
furnishing bed canopies. The fragments are beautiful and somehow touching , as I often find fragmented art to be. According
to the catalogue “frequently the cartoons were over 150 square feet and
cumulatively a set could be over a thousand square feet”.
Some of the tapestries (there are fourteen) are bordered
with simple narrow bands (red is an effective border color in the first one
on view; reds not being prevalent in most of the tapestries - possibly due to
the higher costs of red-dyed wool and silk.) On the other hand, the border of
Giant Leaf Tapestry with Dentated Leaves is very
wide and elaborate, extending into the field on all sides. It is a stunning
frame filled with luscious garlands of fruits and flowers.
As the vogue for Giant Leaf tapestries grew, their
production spread - they were woven in small and large tapestry centers in
Flanders and France for
most of the 16th century; many of their weavers migrated to Paris
as well as to Germany and Denmark.
In Kronberg
Castle in Denmark, a surviving Giant Leaf
tapestry shows a rhinoceros along with exotic birds and other creatures, a
mix possibly created by an artist without a clear mastery of the new
geographical information. (A live rhinoceros being transported from Goa by a Portuguese ship had
caused a sensation in 1515.)
Other Giant Leafs can be seen at the Louvre,
the Victoria and Albert, many museums in Europe. In the United States they are
represented at the Art Institute of Chicago, The Rhode Island School of
Design, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Museum of Fine Arts Boston included two of them
in its 1967 Catalogue of TAPESTRIES. The author states that “literally
hundreds of similar tapestries survive in public and private
collections.” However, this exhibit is, according to the catalogue,
“the first ever devoted to the subject of Giant Leaf tapestries”
The exhibit is the inaugural show at the New
York City gallery of S. Franses, the London historic
tapestry and carpet specialist. The excellent catalogue, ‘Giant Leaf
Tapestries of the Renaissance 1500-1600’, includes essays on their
development, their revival in the late 19th century (William Morris was the
leading exponent), complete plates with descriptions and technical
information. Available from FRANSES . 132 Eat 61 St. NY
NY 10021.
Photo Caption:
Detail of Giant Leaf Tapestry with Serrated Leaves and Hounds
Catalogue #2
Valerie Justin. Sag Harbor, NY.
November 28, 2005
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