Carton de JEAN-BAPTISTE MONNOYER (Lille, 1634... Lot n° 22

TENTURE OF THE GROTESQUES: THE MUSICIANS Manufacture royale de Beauvais, circa 1689 Wool and silk H. 325 x W. 315 cm This theatrical composition features two musicians in a fairy garden. They appear under a high canopy suspended from a fantasy architecture, decorated with vases, flowers and parrots that the connoisseurs of the XVIIth century knew to be "of the design of Baptiste, excellent painter and designer of ornaments" (Letter of Daniel Cronström, January 1695, quoted after J. Coural and C. Gastinel-Coural, Beauvais. Manufacture nationale de Tapisserie, Paris, 1992, p. 29, note 24). This piece belongs to the famous series of Grotesques which made the fame of the Manufacture of Beauvais at the end of the XVIIe century, under the direction of Philippe Béhagle (Audenarde, 1641 - Beauvais, 1705). Béhagle had been formed with the art of the tapestry in Paris and had directed the manufacture of Tournai when Colbert charged him in 1684 to restore that of Beauvais. Our man installed there his Flemish weavers and founded a school of drawings. Anxious to renew the models, he called upon Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer, the greatest painter of flowers and ornaments of his time (fig. 1). Monnoyer composed this series inspired by the engraved work of Jean Berain and realized several models of border, always reinterpreting the motives of Berain (fig. 2). Between 1688 and 1732, nearly one hundred and fifty pieces on different subjects were woven. Louis XIV had ordered a six-piece hanging of "Grotesques on a background of dead leaf wool in a border of green ovals" which was delivered to the castle of Marly (according to J. Coural, op. cit., p. 21). Our tapestry, like those of the King, depicts the characters on a bottom "dead leaf", of this yellow color also known as tobacco of Spain but with a border of red interlaces. Its subject, the Musicians, is quite rare. It seems to have been produced in only about fifteen copies (according to E. Standen, quoted in Five centuries of Tapestry - The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, p. 264). A well-known early eighteenth-century variant is preserved in San Francisco (fig. 3). In ours, the woman playing the triangle is on the right; the man accompanying her on the viola da gamba on the left. Grapevines wrapped around a trellis close the composition on either side of the scene, resonating with the flowery parterre in the foreground.