LATE 18TH CENTURY

This panel, with its floral garlands to the top and small floral spray issuing from an elaborate vase, is stylistically similar to the works produced at the Royal Gobelins Tapestry Manufacture for the Tentures de François Boucher. The general concept was created by Jean Germain Sufflot (1713-1780), the pictoral fields by François Boucher (1703-1770) and the decorative surrounds by Maurice Jacques (1712-1784) in 1758 and the first set, woven by Jacques Neilson (1714-1788), was delivered to George William, sixth Earl of Coventry, for Croome Court, Worcestershire, in 1765 and are now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (E. Standen, European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, pp. 385-401, cat. 57). Numerous tentures of this very successful series were woven, and the last recorded version left the Gobelins workshops in the early 20th Century. The framing columns are not recorded in any of the main weavings.

These columns appear almost identically in tapestries of the late 1780s woven at the Royal Aubusson Tapestry Manufature which are loosely tied to designs by Jean-Baptiste Huët (1745-1811) of pastoral scenes. The columns are particularly close to a design in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institute's National Museum of Design, New York (D. and P. Chevalier, P.-F. Bertrand, Les Tapisseries d'Aubusson et de Felletin, Lausanne, 1988, p. 176) and it is probable that Aubusson based its cartoons on those of Gobelins.