THE GOBELINS FACTORY (_Continued_)
Colbert died most inopportunely in 1684 and was succeeded by his
enemy, and for that matter, the enemy of France, the man of jealousy
and cruelty, Louvois. He had long hated Colbert for his success,
counting as an affront to himself Colbert's marvellous establishment
of a navy which he felt rivalled in importance the army, over which
the direction was his own.
On finding Colbert's baton in his hand, it was but human to strike
with it as much as to direct, and one of his blows fell upon the head
of the Gobelins, Lebrun. Thus history is woven into tapestry. Lebrun
was not at once deposed; first his magnificent wings were clipped, so
that his flights into artistic originality were curtailed. This petty
persecution had a benumbing effect. New models were not encouraged.
Strangely enough, the scenes that glorified the king were no longer
reproduced, nor those of antique kings like Alexander, whose greatness
Louis was supposed to rival.
It is not possible to tell the story of tapestry without telling the
story of the times, for the lesser acts are but the result of the
greater. There are matters in the life of Louis XIV that are
inseparable from our account. These are the associating of his life
with that of the three women whom he exalted far higher than his
queen, Marie Therese, the well-known, much-vaunted mesdames, de la
Valliere, de Montespan and de Maintenon.
Even before the death of Colbert, Louvois, with his army, had
encouraged the religious persecutions and wars of the king, and
shortly after, the widow of the poet Scarron became the royal spouse.
Relentless, indeed, were the persecutions then. It was in the same
year of the marriage that Louis revoked the Edict of Nantes, through
the hand of the weak Le Tellier, an action which gave Louvois ample
excuse for depleting the state coffers. 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. 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. Madame de Maintenon had thrust her leading nose
between the doors of the factory and had scented outraged modesty in
the reproduction there of the tapestries woven from models of Raphael,
Giulio Romano and the classicists, cartoons in great favour after the
hampering of Lebrun's imagination. The naked gods from Olympus must
be clothed, said this pious and modest lady.
This was very well for her role, as her influence over the king lay
deep-rooted in her pose of heavy virtue; but at the Gobelins, the
tapestry-makers must have laughed long and loud at the prudery which
they were set to further by actually weaving pictured garments and
setting them into the hangings where the lithe limbs of Apollo, and
Venus' lovely curves, had been cut away. The hanging called _The
Judgment of Paris_ is one of those altered to suit the refinement of
the times.
Louvois' dominance lasted as long as Lebrun, so the genius of the
latter never reasserted itself in the factory. Two methods of supply
for designs came in vogue, and mark the time. One was to turn to the
old masters of Italy's high Renaissance for drawings. This brought a
quantity of drawings of fables and myths into use, so that palace
walls were decorated with Greek gods instead of modern ones. Raphael,
as a master in decoration, was carefully copied, also other men of his
school. The second source of cartoons was chosen by Louvois, who
searched among previous works for the most celebrated tapestries and
had them copied without change.
Thus came the Gobelins to reproduce hangings that had not originated
in their ateliers. All this traces the change that came from the
clipping of Lebrun's wings of genius. Identification marks they are,
when old tapestries come our way.
Pierre Mignard succeeded Lebrun as director of the Gobelins after the
death of the greatest genius of decoration in modern times. Lebrun
had seen such prosperity of tapestry weaving that eight hundred
workers had scarcely been enough to supply the tapestries ordered.
When Mignard came for his five years of direction, things had mightily
changed, and he did nothing to revive or encourage the work. He owed
his appointment entirely to Louvois, whose protege he had long been.
The same year, 1691, saw the death of them both.
Until 1688 the factory was at its best time of productiveness,
reaching the perfection of modern drawing in its cartoons, and, in its
weaving, equalling the manner of Brussels in the early Sixteenth
Century.
From then on began the decline, for the reasons so forcibly written on
pages of history. The French king's ambition to conquer, his
animosity--jealousy, if you will--toward Holland, his unceasing
conflict with England, added to his fierce attacks on religionists,
especially in the Palatinate--all these things required the most
stupendous expenditures. The Mississippi was now discovered, the
English colonists were in conflict with the French, here in America,
and the New World was becoming too desirable a possession for Louis to
be willing to cede his share without a struggle; and thus came the
expense of fighting the English in that far land which was at least
thirty days' sail away.
Perhaps Mignard worked against odds too great for even a strong
director. Such drains on the state treasury as were made by the
self-indulgent court, and by the political necessities, demanded not
only depriving the Gobelins of proper expensive materials, but in the
department of furniture and ornaments, demanded also the establishment
of a sinister melting pot, a hungry mouth that devoured the precious
metals already made more precious by the artistic hands of the
gold-working artists.
Mignard's futile work was finished by his demise in 1695. Such was
then the pitiable conditions at the Gobelins that it was not
considered worth while to fill his place. Thus ended the first period
of that beautiful conception, art sustained by the state, artists
relieved from all care except that of expressing beauty.
The ateliers were closed; the weavers had to seek other means of
gaining their living. The busy Gobelins, a very Paradise of workers,
an establishment which felt itself the pride of Paris and the pet of
the king, full of merry apprentices and able masters, this happy
solidarity fell under neglect. The courtyards were lonely; the Bievre
rippled by unused; the buildings were silent and deserted. Some of the
workers were happy enough to be taken in at Beauvais, some returned to
Flanders, but many were at the miserable necessity of dropping their
loved professions and of joining the royal troops, for which the
relentless ambition of the king had such large and terrible use.
The time when the factory remained inactive were the dolorous years
from 1694 to 1697. It was in the latter year that peace was signed in
the Holland town of Ryswick, which ended at least one of Louis' bloody
oppressions, the fierce attacks in the Palatinate.
The place of Colbert was never filled, so far as the Gobelins was
concerned. Louvois had not its interests in his hard hands, nor had
his immediate followers in state administrations up to 1708, which
included Mansard (of the roofs) and the flippity courtesan, the Duc
d'Antin. But power was later given to Jules Robert de Cotte to raise
the fallen Gobelins by his own wise direction, assisted by his
father's political co-operation (1699-1735). Once again can we smile
in thinking of the factory where the wares of beauty were produced. Of
course, the artists flocked to the centre, eager to express
themselves. The one most interesting to us was Claude Audran. Others
there were who contributed adorable designs and helped build up the
most exquisite expressions of modern art, but, alas, their modesty was
such that their names are scarce known in connexion with the art they
vivified.
The aged Louis was ending his forceful reign in increasing weakness,
deserted at the finish by all but the rigid de Maintenon; and
four-year-old Louis, the grandson of the Grand Dauphin, was succeeding
under the direction of the Regent of Orleans. New monarchs, new
styles, the rule was; for the newly-crowned must have his waves of
flattery curling about the foot of the throne. Louis XIV, the Grand
Monarque, lived to his pose of heavy magnificence even in the
furnishing and decorating of the apartments where he ruled as king and
where he lived as man. Sumptuous splendour, expressed in heavy design,
in deep colouring, with much red and gold, these were the order of the
day, and best expressed the reign.
But with Philip as regent, and the young king but a baby, a gayer mood
must creep into the articles of beauty with which man self-indulgently
decorates his surroundings. Pomp of a heavy sort had no place in the
regent's heart. He saw life lightly, and liked to foster the belief
that a man might make of it a pretty play.
Thus, given so good excuse for a new school of decoration, Claude
Audran snatched up his talented brush and put down his dainty
inspirations with unfaltering delicacy of touch. He wrote upon his
canvas poems in life, symphonies in colour, created a whole world of
tasteful fancy, a world whose entire intent was to please. He left the
heavy ways of pomp and revelled in a world where roses bloom and
ribbons flutter, where clouds are strong to support the svelte deity
upon them, and where the rudest architecture is but an airy trellis.
The classic, the Greek, he never forgot. It was ever his inspiration,
his alphabet with which he wrote the spirit of his composition, but it
was a classic thought played upon with the most talented of
variations. Pure Greek was too cold and chaste for the temper of the
time in which he lived and worked and of which he was the creature;
and so his classic foundation was graced with curves, with colour,
with artful abandon, and all the charming fripperies of one of the
most exquisite periods of decoration. Gods and goddesses were a
necessary part of such compositions, and a continual playing among
amorini, but such deities lived not upon Olympus, nor anywhere outside
France of the Eighteenth Century. The heavy human forms made popular
by the inflation of the Seventeenth Century were banished to some dark
haven reserved for by-gone modes, and these new gods were exquisite
as fairies while voluptuous as courtesans. They were all caught young
and set, while still adolescent and slender, in suitable niches of
delicate surroundings.
The talent of Audran, not content with figures alone, was lavishly
expended on those ingenious decorative designs which formed the frame
and setting of the figures, the airy world in which they lived and in
the borders that confined the whole.
Only a study of tapestries or their photographs can show the radical
depth of the change from the styles prevailing under the influence of
Madame de Maintenon to those produced by Audran and his school under
the regence. The difference in character of the two dominations is the
very evident cause. It is as though the severe moral pose of de
Maintenon had suppressed a whole Pandora's box of loves and graces
who, when the lid was lifted by the Regent, flew, a happy crew, to fix
themselves in dainty decorative effect, trailing with them their
complement of accessory flowers, butterflies, clouds and tempered
grotesques.
Philippe d'Orleans, under the influence of the corrupt cleverness of
Cardinal du Bois, celebrated the few years of his regency by
bankrupting France with John Law's financial fallacies (this was the
time of the South Sea Bubble and the Mississippi scheme) and by
returning to Spain her princess as unsuited for the boy king's
mate--with war as the natural result of that insult.
But he also let artists have their way, and the style that they
supplied him, shows a talented invention unsurpassed. Audran we will
place at the top, but only to fix a name, for there was a whole army
of men composing the tapestry designs that so delighted the people of
those days and that have gone on thrilling their beholders for two
hundred years, and which distinguish French designs from all
others--which give them that indefinable quality of grace and softness
that we denominate French. Wizards in design were the artists who
developed it and those who continue it in our own times.