19TH CENTURY, IN THE MANNER OF JOHN VANDERBANK

This tapestry, copying an early 18th-century Soho design known as Couple under a Canopy, with its realistic three-dimensional figures on floating islands inspired by motifs found on Chinese lacquer screens or cabinets, imitates a distinct group known as the Indian (or Indo-Chinese) series, which are usually on a brown or black ground, and depict Chinese, Indian and Turkish motifs variously arranged to create at least eight subjects, described by modern scholars as, The Harpist, The Concert, The Toilette of the Princess, The Palanquin, The Tent, The Tea Party, Couple with a Servant, and Couple under a Canopy (K. Brosens, European Tapestries in the Art Institute of Chicago, New Haven and London, 2008, p. 348). At least three Soho Tapestry workshops used the same cartoons (templates): John Vanderbank (active 1689-1717), yeoman arras-maker at the Great Wardrobe tapestry workshop in Great Queen Street, in the parish of Saint Giles-in-the-Fields, produced tapestries for Mary II at Kensington Palace, described as ‘designed in the Indian manner’, which were listed in the 1697 inventory of the palace as ‘Seven peices [sic] of Tapistry [sic] hangings with India figures 9 foot deep’; the lesser-known Michael Mazarind, who had an independent workshop in Arlington Street, previously occupied by the tapestry-maker James Bridges, and Leonard Chabaneix of Huguenot descent, who took over Mazarind’s premises from 1702. To date, only one Indian tapestry, a version of The Harpist, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, bears Vanderbank’s signature.