HOW IT IS MADE
Wanting to see the wheels go 'round is a desire not limited to babes.
We, with our minds stocked with the history and romance of tapestry,
yet want to know just how it is made in every particular, just how the
loom works, how the threads are placed.
It seems that there must be some obscure and occult secret hidden
within the looms that work such magic, and we want to pluck it out,
lay it in the sunlight and dissect its intricacies. Well, then, let us
enter a tapestry factory and see what is there. But it is safe to
forecast the final deduction--which must ever be that the god of
patience is here omnipotent. Talent there must be, but even that is
without avail if patience lacks.
The factory for tapestries seems, then, little like a factory. The
belt and wheel, the throb and haste are not there. The whole place
seems like a quiet school, where tasks are done in silence broken by
an occasional voice or two. It is a place where every one seems bent
on accomplishing a brave amount of fancy-work; a kindergarten, if you
like, for grown-ups.
Within are many departments of labour. The looms are the thing, of
course, so must be considered first, although much preparing is done
before their work can be begun.
The looms are classic in their method, in their simplicity. They have
scarcely changed since the days when Solomon built his Temple and
draped it with such gorgeous hangings that even the inspired writers
digress to emphasise their richness with long descriptions that could
not possibly have assisted the cause of their religion.
The stitch made by the modern loom is the same as that made by the
looms of the furthermost-back Egyptian, by the Greeks, by the Chinese,
of primitive peoples everywhere, by the people of the East in the
familiar Khelim rugs, and by the aborigines of the two Americas. There
is nothing new, nothing obscure about it, being a simple weaving of
warp and woof. Penelope's loom was the same almost as that in use
to-day at the Gobelins factory in Paris. Archeologists have discovered
pictures of the ancient Egyptian loom, and of Penelope's, and there is
but little change from the times of these ladies to our days.
The fact is, the work is hand-work, must always be so, and the loom is
but a tool for its working, a tool which keeps in place the threads
set by hand. That is why tapestry must always be valuable and original
and no more possible to copy by machine than is a painting.
High warp and low warp are the terms so often used as to seem a
shibboleth. _Haute lisse_ and _basse lisse_ are their French
equivalents. They describe the two kinds of looms, the former
signifying the loom which stands upright, or high; the latter
indicating the loom which is extended horizontally or low. On the high
loom, the instrument which holds the thread is called the _broche_,
and on the low loom it is called the _flute_.
The stitch produced by the two is the same. The manner of producing
it varies in convenience to the operators, the low-warp being the
easier, or at least the more convenient and therefore the quicker
method.
The cynic is ever ready to say that the tyrant living within a man
declares only for those things which represent great sacrifice of time
and effort on the part of other men. Perhaps it is true, and that
therein lies the preference of the connoisseur in tapestry for the
works of the high-warp loom. Even the wisest experts cannot always
tell by an examination of a fabric, on which sort of loom it was
woven, high warp or low, other evidence being excluded.
The high loom has, then, the threads of its warp hung like a weighted
veil, from the top of the loom to the floor, with a huge wooden roller
to receive the finished fabric at the bottom and one at the top for
the yet unneeded threads. Each thread of the warp is caught by a loop,
which in turn is fastened to a movable bar, and by means of this the
worker is able to advance or withdraw the alternate threads for the
casting of the _broche_ or _flute_, which is the shuttle. Behind the
veil of the warp sits the weaver--_tissier_ or _tapissier_--with his
supply of coloured thread; back of him is the cartoon he is copying.
He can only see his work by means of a little mirror the other side of
his warp, which reflects it. The only indulgence that convenience
accords him is a tracing on the white threads of the warp, a copy of
the picture he is weaving. Thus stands the prisoner of art, sentenced
to hard labour, but with the heart-swelling joy of creating, to
lighten his task.
[Illustration: WEAVER AT WORK ON LOW LOOM. HERTER STUDIO]
[Illustration: SEWING AND REPAIR DEPARTMENT. BAUMGARTEN ATELIERS]
High-warp looms were those that made famous the tapestries of Arras in
the Fifteenth Century, of Brussels in the Sixteenth, and of Paris in
the Seventeenth, therefore it is not strange that they are worshipped
as having a resident, mysterious power.
To-day, the age of practicality, they scarcely exist outside the old
Gobelins in Paris. But this is not the day of tapestry weaving.
A shuttle, thrown by machine, goes all the width of the fabric, back
and forth. The _flute_ or _broche_, which is the shuttle of the
tapestry weaver, flies only as far as it is desired to thrust it, to
finish the figure on which its especial colour is required. Thus, a
leaf, a detail of any small sort, may mount higher and higher on the
warp, to its completion, before other adjacent parts are attempted.
The effect of this is to leave open slits, petty gashes in the fabric,
running lengthwise of the warp, and these are all united later with
the needle, in the hands of the women who thus finish the pieces.
Unused colours wound on the hundreds of flutes are dropped at the
demand of the pattern, left in a rich confusion of shades to be
resumed by the workmen at will; but the threads are not severed, if
the colour is to be used again soon.
Low-warp work is the same except for the weaver's position in relation
to his work. Instead of the warp like a thin wall before his face, on
which he seems to play as on one side of a harp, the warp is extended
before him as a table. It is easy to see how much more convenient is
this method.
The wooden rollers are the same, one for the yet unused length of
warp, the other for the finished fabric, and over one of these rollers
the worker leans, protected from its hostile hardness by a pillow.
The pattern lies below, just beneath the warp, and easily seen through
it, not the mere tracing as on the threads of the high-warp loom, but
the coloured cartoon, so that shades may be followed as well as lines.
It sometimes happens, however, in copying a valuable old tapestry,
that a black and white drawing only is placed under the warp while the
original is suspended behind the weavers, who look to it for colour
suggestion.
In low-warp the worker has the privilege of laying his flutes on top
the work, the flutes not at the moment in use, and there they lie in
convenient mass ready to resume for the figure abandoned for another.
If the right hand thrusts the flute, it is the duty of the left to see
that the alternate and the limiting threads of the warp are properly
lifted. First comes a pressure of the foot on a long, lath-like pedal
which is attached to the bar holding in turn the loops which pass
around alternate threads.
That pressure lifts the threads, and the fingers of the left hand,
deft and agile, limit and select those which the flute shall cover
with its coloured woof.
After the casting of a thread, or of a group of threads, the weaver
picks up a comb of steel or of ivory, and packs hard the woof, one
line against another, to make the fabric firm and even in the weaving.
[Illustration: BAUMGARTEN TAPESTRY. LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY]
[Illustration: BAUMGARTEN TAPESTRY. MODERN CARTOON]
Such then is the simple process of the looms, far simpler seen than
described and yet depending absolutely for its beauty on the talent
and patience of gifted workers. It is as simple as the alphabet, yet
as complicated as the dictionary.
Patient years of apprenticeship must a man spend before he can become
a good weaver, and then must he give the best years of his life to
becoming perfect in the craft. But if the work is exacting, at least
it is agreeable, almost lovable, and in delightful contrast to the
labour of those who but tend machines driven by power. And if the art
of tapestry weaving is almost a lost one to-day, at least the weavers
can find in history much matter for pride. It is no mean ambition to
follow the profession of conscientious Nicolas Bataille, of the able
Pannemaker, of La Planche and Comans, of Tessier, Cozette, and a
hundred others of family and fame.
Much preparation is necessary before the loom can be set going. First
is the design, the cartoon. There we are in the department of the
artist, and must talk in whispers. Raphael belongs there, and
Leonardo; and Rubens, Teniers, Lebrun, Boucher and David, train us
through the past centuries into our own.
But the cartoon of to-day is not so sacred a matter, and we may speak
of it frankly--regretfully, too. Cartoons hang all over the walls of
the tapestry factory, so much property for the setting of future
scenes, and besides, they make a decoration which alone would lift the
tapestry factory into the regions of art and class it among ateliers,
instead of factories. The cartoons are painted, however, where the
artist will, in his own studio or in one provided for the purpose by
the director, as in the case of the Baumgarten works. They have the
look of special designs. They are not done in the manner of a painting
to be hung on a wall. Their brushwork is smooth and broad, dividing
lines well distinguished by marked contrasts in colour to make
possible their translation into the language of silk and wool.
After the cartoon is ready, comes the warp. That is set with the
closeness agreed upon. Naturally, the smaller the thread of the warp,
the closer is it set, the more threads to the inch, and thus comes
fine fabric. Coarser warp means fewer threads to the inch, quicker
work for the weaver and less value to the tapestry. From ten to twenty
threads to the inch carries the limits of coarseness and fineness. In
fine weaving, a weaver will accomplish but a square foot a week. Think
of that, you who wonder at the price of tapestries ordered for the new
drawing-room.
The warp comes to the factory all in big hanks of even thread.
Nowadays it is usually of cotton, although they contend at the
Gobelins that wool warp is preferable, for it gives the finished
fabric a lightness and flexibility that the heavier, stiffer cotton
destroys.
Setting the warp is a matter of patience and precision, and we will
leave the workman with it, to make it the whole length of the tapestry
to be woven, and to fasten the loops of thread around each _chaine_
and to fasten those in turn, alternating, to the bar by means of
which they may be shifted to make the in-and-out of the weaving.
Then after choosing the colours, the weaving begins. It is like
nothing so much as a piece of fancy-work. If it were not for the
cumbersome loom, I am sure ladies would emulate the king who wove for
amusement, and would make chair-pieces on the summer veranda.
But before the silks and wools go to the weaving they are treated to a
beauty-bath in the dye-room. Hanks of wool and skeins of silk are but
neutral matters, coming to the factory devoid of individuality, mere
pale, soft bulk.
A room apart, somewhere away from the studio of design and the rooms
where the looms stand stolid, is a laboratory of dyes, a place which
looks like a farmhouse kitchen on preserving day. You sniff the air as
you go in, the air that is swaying long bunches of pendulous colour,
and it smells warm and moist and full of the suggestions of magic.
Over a big cauldron two men are bending, stirring a witches' broth to
charm man's eye. One of the wooden paddles brings up a mass from the
heavy liquid. It is silk, glistening rich, of the colour of melted
rubies. Upstairs the looms are making it into a damask background onto
which are thrown the garlands Boucher drew and Tessier loved to work.
Dainties fished up from another cauldron are strung along a line to
dry, soft wool and shining silk, all in shades of grapes, of asters,
of heliotropes, telling their manifest destiny. And beyond, are great
bunches of colour, red which mounts a quivering scale to salmon pink,
blue which sails into tempered gray, greens dancing to the note of
the forest. It is a nature's workshop, a laboratory where the rainbow
serves, apprenticed.
Jars, stone jars, little kegs, all ugly enough, are standing against
the wall. But uncover one, touch the thick dark stuff within, and
feast your eye on the colour left on a curious finger-tip. You are
close to the cochineal, to indigo, and all the wonderful alchemy of
colour.
Aniline? Not a bit of the treacherous stuff. It takes the eye, but it
is a fickle friend. They say a mordant has been found to stay the
flight of its lovely colours. Perhaps; it may be. But what weaver of
tapestry would be willing to confide his labour to the care of a dye
that has not known the test of ages? Aniline dye, says the director of
a tapestry factory, may last twenty years--but twenty years is nothing
in the life of a tapestry. Over in Paris, at the Gobelins, a master
rules as chemist of the dyes, with the dignity of a special laboratory
for making them.
In America, with no government assuming the expense, the dyes are
bought in such form that only expert dyers can use them in the few
factories which exist. But no new hazards are taken. The matter is too
serious. Economy in dyes brings too great disaster to contemplate. It
is only too true that a man, several men, may labour a year to produce
a perfect work, and that all the labour may be ruined by an ephemeral
dye, by the escape of tones skilfully laid. Let commerce cheat in some
other way, if it must, but not in this. Let the dye be honest, as
enduring as the colours imprisoned in gems.
[Illustration: BAUMGARTEN TAPESTRY. MODERN CARTOON]
It is a modern economy. The ancients knew not of it, and were
willing to spend any amount on colours. More than that a port, or a
nation, was willing to rest its fame on a single colour. Purple of
Tyre, red of Turkey, yellow of China, are terms familiar through the
ages, and think not these colours were to be had for the asking. They
brought prices which we do not pay now even in this age of money. The
brothers Gobelins--their fame originally rested on their ambition to
be "dyers of scarlet," that being an ultimate test of skill.
It is a serious matter, that of dyeing wools and silks for tapestries,
and one which the directors conduct within the walls of the tapestry
factory. 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. It is owing to her conscientious
work that the tapestry repairers of museums can find appropriate
threads.
It is interesting to trace the differing gamut of colour through the
ages. Old dyes produced, old weavers needed, but twenty tones for the
old work. Tapestries of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries were as
simple in scale as stained glass, and as honest. Flesh tints were
neutral by contrast to the splendid reds, honest yellows and rich
greens. Colours meant something, then, too; had a sentimental language
all their own. When white predominated, purity was implied; black was
mortification of the flesh; livid yellow was tribulation; red,
charity; green, meditation.
An examination of the colours in the series which depicts the life of
Louis XIV, reveals a use of but seventy-nine colours. So up to that
time, great honesty of dye, and fine decorative effect were preserved.
The shades were produced by two little tricks open as the day,
hatching being one, the other, winding two shades on the same broche
or shuttle. Hatching, as we know, is merely a penman's trick, of
shading with lines of light and dark.
It was when they began to paint the lily, in the days of pretty
corruption, that the whole matter of dyeing changed. In the Eighteenth
Century when the Regent Philip, and then La Pompadour, set the mode,
things greatly altered. When big decorative effects were no more, the
stimulating effect of deep strong colour was considered vulgar, and,
only the suave sweetness of Boucher, Nattier, Fragonard, were admired.
Every one played a pretty part, all life was a theatre of gay comedy,
or a flattered miniature.
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. And the weavers wove them
all into their fabric-painting, with the result that when the light
lay on them long, the delicate shades faded and with them was lost the
meaning of the design. And that is why the Gobelins of the older time
are worth more as decoration than those of the later.
We are doing a little better nowadays. There is a limit to the tones,
and in all new work a decided tendency to abandon the copying of
brush-shading in favour of a more restricted gamut of colour. By this
means the future worker may regain the lost charm of the simple old
pieces of work.
Another room in the factory of tapestry interests those who like to
see the creation of things. It is one of the prettiest rooms of all,
and is more than ever like a kindergarten for grown-ups. Or, if you
like, it is a chamber in a feudal castle where the women gather when
the men are gone to war.
Here the workers are all girls and women, each bending over a large
embroidery frame supported at a convenient level from the floor. On
one frame is a long flowered border with cartouches in the strong rich
colours of Louis XIV. On another a sofa-seat copied from Boucher. They
are both new, but like all work fresh from the loom are full of the
open slits left in the process of weaving, a necessity of the changing
colours and the requirements of the drawing.
All these little slits, varying from half an inch to several inches in
length, must be sewed with strong, careful stitches before the
tapestry can be considered complete.
On other frames are stretched old tapestries for repairs. At the
Gobelins as many as forty women are thus employed. The malapropos
deduction springs here that the demand for repaired old work is
greater than that for new in the famous factory, for only six or eight
weavers are there occupied.
Repairing is almost an art in itself. The emperor established a small
school at Berlin for training girls in this trade. The studio of the
late Mr. Ffoulke in Florence kept twenty or thirty girls occupied. The
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has a repair studio under a
graduate of the Berlin school. The factories of Baumgarten and of
Herter, in New York, also conduct repairs; and the museum at Boston as
well.
We cannot make old tapestries, but we can restore and preserve them by
skilled labour in special ateliers. Restoration by the needle is the
only perfect restoration, and this is as yet but little done here,
although the method is so well known in Europe. We deplore the quicker
way, to use the loom for weaving large sections of border or large
bits which have gone into hopeless shreds, or have disappeared
altogether by reason of the bitter years when tapestries had fallen
into neglect. But the quicker way is the poorer, with these great
claimants for time. The woven figures are relentless in this, that
they claim of the living man a lion's share of his precious days. His
reward is that they outlast him. Food for cynics lies there.
The careful worker looks close and sees the warp exposed like fiddle
strings here and there. She matches the colour of silk and wool to the
elusive shades and covers stitch by stitch the bare threads, in
perfect imitation of the loom's way.
Sometimes the warp is gone. Then the work tests the best skill. The
threads, the _chaine_, must be picked up, one by one, and united
invisibly to the new, and then the pattern woven over with the needle.
It happens that large holes remain to be filled entirely, the pattern
matched, the design caught or imagined from some other part of the
fabric. That takes skill indeed. But it is done, and so well, that the
repairer is called not that, but a restorer.
The two factories in New York, the Baumgarten and Herter ateliers,
have certain employes always busy with repairs and restorations. Given
even a fragment, the rest is supplied to make a perfect whole, in
these studios where the manner of the old workers is so closely
studied. For big repairs a drawing is made, a cartoon on the same
principle as that of large cartoons, in colours, these following the
old. Then it remains for the weaver to set his loom with the
corresponding number of threads, that the new fabric may match the old
in fineness. Then, too, comes the test of matching colours, a test
that almost never discovers a worker equal to its exactions. That is
as often as not the fault of the dyer who has supplied colours too
fresh.
It is the repairs done by the needle that give the best effect,
although such restorations are costly and slow.
Old repairs on old tapestries have been made, in some instances, very
long ago. It often happens, in old sets, that a great piece of another
tapestry has been roughly set in, like the knee-patches of a farm boy.
The object has been merely to fill the hole, not to match colour
scheme or figure. And these patches are by the judicious restorer
taken out and their place carefully filled with the needle.
Moths, say some, do not devour old tapestries. The reason given is
that the ancient wool is so desiccated as to be no longer nutritious.
A pretty argument, but not to be trusted, for I have seen moths
comfortably browsing on a Burgundian hanging, keeping house and
raising families on such precious stuff.
Commerce demands that tricks shall be played in the repair room, but
not such great ones that serious corruption will result. The coarse
verdures of the Eighteenth Century that were thrown lightly off the
looms with transient interest are sought now for coverings to antique
chairs. To give the unbroken greens more charm, an occasional bird is
snipped from a worn branch where he has long and mutely reposed, and
is posed anew on the centre of a back or seat. It is the part of the
repairer to see that he looks at home in his new surroundings.
If metal threads have not been spoken of in this chapter on _modus
operandi_, it is because metal is so little used since the time of
Louis XV as to warrant omitting it. And the little that appears seems
very different from the "gold of Cyprus" that made gorgeous and
valuable the tapestries of Arras, of Brussels and of old Paris.