There’s nothing like a house guest to get you off the sofa, into the car, and on the road in search of new adventures. Last Saturday that’s just what I did with my guest and nephew Louis Graup, a globetrotter from Auburn, PA. Readers may remember that last January, he inspired me to write about the Preservation Hall Jazz Band, a very important Pottsville connection to the French Quarter of New Orleans.
This time we headed to Beauvais, a town about 30 miles from my new home, less than the distance between Pottsville and Reading. In a country like France, this short distance carried us to a different world.
Beauvais is the gateway to what the French call “le Nord,” “the North,” once the heart of the coal, iron and textile industries of France, today a depressed region where unemployment and poverty are higher than in other parts of the country. It is also a region of breweries, beer-drinkers and the best frites (French fries) of France.
Before this excursion, I’d only passed through Beauvais once about 30 years ago, to glance at its cathedral, boasting the highest nave of any Gothic church in Europe, and then we got back on the road. It was a gloomy day, and Beauvais looked like a pretty depressing place. In 1940, the city was heavily bombed by the Luftwaffe. The reconstruction created a functional city with little charm.
Last Saturday, I set out with some apprehension. It was “National Heritage Day” and many buildings, be they monuments, factories, city halls, churches or museums, generally closed to the public or accessible for a fee, were opening their doors for free. Beauvais had an interesting program, but I worried my nephew would be disappointed by a city that lacked the luster and cultural prestige of Paris.
Instead, the city and its distinctive cultural heritage exceeded our wildest expectations.
In fact, I had set out with an intention. I wanted to visit the “Manufacture de Beauvais,” an institution founded in 1664 by Louis XIV. Its purpose was to create tapestries, monumental in size, to rival those of Belgium and the Netherlands, the leaders in the field at that time.
Beauvais was a stop on “la route des Flandres,” an important trade route linking Paris to the Low Countries. At that time, the most famous tapestry of France, the series known as “La Dame à la licorne,” The Lady and the Unicorn on view at Musée de Cluny in Paris, was designed by Jean d’Ypres, a French artist active at the beginning of the 16th century. However, its creation as a tapestry was most likely carried out in Belgium or Holland, where the skilled craftsmen were concentrated.
Louis XIV hoped to put an end to the Flemish monopoly and bring to France the money and glory associated with tapestry-making at that time. Tapestries often measured 12 by 15 feet in size. They covered stone walls, kept out the cold, but most of all, reinterpreted in textile the work of great artists in myriad colors, palettes so complex as to bring art to life in a new form.
Dyed threads of wool, silk and cotton, were skillfully woven by “harpists”—so great were the weavers’ skills that they were compared to the masters of this difficult musical instrument. They plucked the vertical warp of their looms, separating odd and even threads using a foot pedal or treadle, intertwining the horizonal weft threads, creating a collaborative work between artist and weaver.
In 1940, the Beauvais manufacture, in existence for almost 3 centuries, was destroyed in the bombing. The weavers moved to the Paris “Manufacture des Gobelins,” also created by Louis XIV, in 1665. Not until 1989 did the immense horizontal floor looms return to Beauvais, and the manufacture became once again active in the city of its founding, housed in the former red-brick slaughterhouses of the city.
That’s where Louis and I showed up. We were able to touch the horizontal looms which, except for one innovation in the 1960’s—they can now be shifted from horizontal to vertical, have not changed since the Middle Ages.
Working this type of loom is particularly complex. The warp threads, called “la chaîne” in French, are completely covered by those of the weft. The weavers work with the underside up, and the upside is only visible thanks to a mirror placed underneath. Using bobbins of different colors, they weave one small portion at a time. As they progress, the tapestry is rolled onto to what looks like a giant rolling pin. Only when it is completed, when the tapestry “falls from the loom,” can artist and weaver view the entirety of their work.
This is how it was done in the Middle Ages, in the 17th century of Louis XIV, and how it is still done today.
First, you begin with a painting. Then the artist produces a “cartoon,” a drawing that serves as a sketch for the tapestry. Next the weaver produces a small model, proposing a palette of colored thread. There is back-and-forth discussion between the two to arrive at a shared vision of colors and, equally important, textures that bring new depth to the original. Then work begins on the loom, the long process, which can last for years, of creating a painting in thread.
Today the tapestries produced at Beauvais are works of prestige that belong to the French state. They hang in Elysée Palace, government buildings, and embassies around the world. The tapestries represent the work of contemporary artists. The technique makes “abstract” art “concrete,” surprisingly sensual thanks to the textures unique to the art of tapestry. And for anyone who says they don’t like modern or contemporary art, I guarantee that one of these tapestries will change your mind.
Louis and I spent a long time at the Manufacture, but we still had more to do and see. We went to a 12th century “maladrerie,” a sick house for lepers and later for those suffering from the plague. There, beneath the wooden beams of a 13th century barn, we listened to a harp concert, an unplanned part of our day but much in tune with the tapestry “harpists.” We also visited the cathedral and ended our excursion, of course, with bière et frites, without which a day in “le Nord” would not be complete.
When you look for beauty, you’ll find it. That’s what our day in Beauvais taught me.
