Existing comment:
Rococo: The Eighteenth Century:
By the mid-18th century, the tapestry industry in Europe was essentially concentrated in France and Brussels. The French royal workshops had expanded to include sites at Beauvais and Aubusson, in addition to the main production center at the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. Artistically, France remained the leader while smaller European workshops recycled or imitated the most successful designs.
The new Rococo style brought a greater emphasis on decorative and ornamental pieces, rather than weighty figural compositions on topics from history or religious sources. In response to the desire for more intimate spaces, the scale, color, and design of tapestries changed, though they were no less sophisticated. Designers and viewers delighted in illusionistic tricks. In the example above and in the Don Quixote series in this gallery, for instance, the borders and central scenes seem to overlap in places; smaller scenes are "framed" or "hung" as painted on a background pattern that looks like damask or wallpaper; borders look like architecture and appear to support garlands, vases, and animals. Entire rooms, including their furniture, ceilings, and carpets, were carefully coordinated.
The illustration above shows a view into the Tapestry Room at Osterley Park in London that was conceived by the famous English architect Robert Adam for his patron Robert Child around 1775. Child ordered the wall panels and furniture covers directly from the Gobelins manufactory in Paris. He wanted them to include medallion images with mythological scenes after Francois Boucher, one of the most fashionable painters in Paris. The color scheme of the room is dominated by deeper and lighter shades of rosy pink set against pale gold tones with touches of bright blue and bits of green. Adam's design for the ceiling and carpet take up these colors; the carpet includes a flower-filled vase typical of the Rococo, but the ornamental forms are strictly Neoclassical in keeping with the architect's own preferences. |