Weaving Magic
22 April 2021
The age-old appeal of tapestries.
Daisy Dunn
Daisy Dunn is a classicist and biographer and the author of Homer: A Ladybird Expert Book for adults and children.
17th century Brussels tapestry, 5.24 x 3.45m.
Ever since Penelope unpicked the threads of her tapestry in the Odyssey, desperate to put off marriage to a foul suitor, weaving has been associated with wile as much as with artistry. In the ancient world, it was principally women who laboured at the loom, and men who wove the stories about them. What were their wives really up to as they sat with their spindles? What gossip were they sharing? How many secrets were they entrusting to their cloth?
The enigmatic appeal of tapestries – their scope for capturing large narrative scenes while concealing from all but the most perceptive small and surprising details – reached its height in early modern Europe. Across France and the Low Countries, highly skilled weavers perfected techniques for reproducing artists’ intricate designs on the weft in a myriad of colours and tones.
Simply put, the process involved stretching natural warp threads between the two rollers of a loom to form a grid-like base, and passing colourful weft threads through them. Each design was transferred from full-scale painted ‘cartoons’. Perhaps the most famous of these, commissioned from Raphael by Pope Leo X in 1515, were used to produce the tapestries of the Apostles for the Sistine Chapel.
Not to be left out, Henry VIII acquired more than 2,000 tapestries to adorn his various homes in chilly old England.
Far from being consigned to history, tapestries have enjoyed a renaissance in recent years, with designers creating or commissioning their own, or purchasing antique examples to hang in modern homes. Open an interior design magazine, or scroll through Instagram, and you are almost guaranteed to alight upon some tapestry or other dangling behind a bedstead or, shudder, growing damp beside a bathtub. Where once they kept out draughts, today tapestries are employed to introduce warmth and texture to otherwise spartan contemporary living spaces.
As Robin Yacoubian of Gallery Yacou relates, there is some variation in the kinds of tapestry people are seeking at the moment, with some collectors favouring historical and Biblical scenes, and other buyers opting for more calming, pared back subjects drawn from the natural world, with forestry and birds in particular demand.
Many factors determine their value and desirability. When buying a tapestry, one should consider, for instance, whether it is complete or, as is often the case, a fragment of a larger piece, perhaps cut from its original borders.
‘Tapestries are quite undervalued if you compare them with paintings of the same period’, says Yacoubian, who adds that it is possible to pick up a fine tapestry fragment for £4,000-£5,000, although rarer complete tapestries with their borders in good condition, and dating especially from the 18th century or earlier, could fetch a substantial five figures.
On Yacoubian’s books at the moment, for example, is a magnificently grand seventeenth-century tapestry in good condition from Belgium showing Alexander the Great trampling a fallen enemy as he rides into battle. Valued at £38,000, and characterised by a palette ranging from rich reds and golds to sky blue, it has some of the dynamism of a Delacroix.
Antique Sarouk Fereghan rug, circa 1890, 2 x 1.3m.
While condition may affect price, most tapestries will have undergone some restoration owing to their age, a factor buyers generally accept provided the work has been done sympathetically. And as Robin Yacoubian, explains, condition is not a priority for everyone:
‘The country house look is very much in vogue at the moment. Many clients want to achieve a look that their house has not been touched in generations, so to them the condition of the tapestries is not always so important.’
Tapestry threads were traditionally wool but, as with fine carpets, it is not unusual to find silk woven into the weft. Antique silk-weave carpets, in fact, may be hung as tapestries, and enjoyed in much the same way. As Stephen Marsh of Farnham Antique Carpets says, you don’t always want to tread on carpets like these, as silk thread is more prone to wear, so displaying them on a wall may be a good alternative.
A beautiful Fereghan rug, associated with 19th-century Western Persia, would look particularly striking hanging on a wall, especially if lit in such a way as to illuminate its rich geometric patterning. ‘It’s a work of art’, says Marsh of one such carpet recently installed in a client’s stairwell.
To give an antique tapestry or finely woven rug a new home is to offer up its handiwork to fresh appreciation and inspection. Like a painting or a sculpture, it is an object that demands to be looked at from both near and far. Let the thought of history’s wily weavers be with you as you settle in front of it. You never know what stories and secrets might have gone into its glorious knit.
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