FRANCE, CIRCA 1785

In 1664 the Royal Manufactory of Tapestries was founded at Beauvais and began primarily to produce tapestries by order of the French government. De Menou (first name and life dates unknown) was appointed director in 1780, and he employed Pierre-Barthelemy Langlois from the Gobelins factory in order to increase the production of tapestry woven carpets (see Sherrill, Sarah, Carpets and Rugs of Europe and America, New York, 1996). The present carpet can be attributed to Beauvais because of its fine weave (unlike Aubusson carpets of the same period) and its similarity in design to a signed knotted-pile Beauvais rug (ibid, p. 94, plate 101). A comparable, complete, Beauvais flat-woven rug, drawn from the same cartoon as our example, is in the The Wrightsman Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (see Watson, F.J.B., The Wrightsman Collection, Volume II, New York, 1966, pp. 506-507). In our example, it appears that the colors have been reversed and that the blossoms in the center remain from a central floral wreath.