Beauvais tapestry

The Beauvais tapestry manufacture was the second in importance, after the Gobelins tapestry, of French tapestry workshops that were established under the general direction of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance minister of Louis XIV. Whereas the royal Gobelins manufacture executed tapestries for the royal residences and for ambassadorial gifts, the manufacture at Beauvais always remained a private enterprise. Beauvais specialised in low-warp tapestry weaving, though the letters patent of 1664, authorising the company and offering royal protection, left the field open for the production of high-warp tapestry as well.

The first entrepreneur, Louis Hinard, a native of Beauvais who had already established workshops in Paris, produced unambitious floral and foliate tapestries called verdures and landscape tapestries, which are known through chance notations in royal accounts. He was arrested for his debts in 1684, and the workshops were refounded more successfully under Philippe Behagle, a merchant tapestry-manufacturer from Oudenarde, who had also worked in the traditional tapestry-weaving city of Tournai. Behagle's first successes were a suite of Conquests of the King which complemented a contemporaneous Gobelins suite showing episodes in the Life of the King, without directly competing with them. A suite of Acts of the Apostles, following copies of Raphael's cartoons, are in the cathedral of Beauvais. The so-called Teniers tapestries, in the manner of village scenes painted by David Teniers the Younger, began to be woven under Behagle and continued popular, with up-dated borders, into the eighteenth century, when the earliest series of archives begin.

The great series of Grotesques (illustration, left) initiated in the 1690s became a mainstay of Beauvais production, woven through the Régence. The cartoons, which were inspired by the engravings of the elder Jean Bérain and were carried out to cartoons by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, a painter attached to the Gobelins factory, were based on fanciful grotteschi. Against mustard yellow grounds vases and baskets of fruit with birds, a specialty of Monnoyer's, are contrasted with lively figures, sometimes acrobats and dancers, sometimes from the Commedia dell'arte in slender and fanciful arabesque architecture.

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