4' x 6'3" French Pictorial Tapestry Rug | Medieval Kings and Woven Banderoles | 17th Century

This is a picture, not a pattern. Measuring 4' x 6'3", the panel is a hand-woven flat weave in wool, worked weft over warp with no pile at all, so the whole surface reads like a painted page: four standing figures, four fluttering inscriptions in Gothic blackletter, and a dense flowering ground behind them. Tapestries of this kind were made to hang, and the scale suits a chimney breast, a stair wall or a panel of wainscot better than it suits a floor, though at this size it also sits comfortably in the company of 4 x 6 rugs in a study or library. The weave is even, the drawing is crisp, the wool has kept its body, and the piece is in excellent condition with no losses visible in the field. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording the size, fibre, technique and dating.

Design and Motifs

Four crowned and armoured figures stand in a row, each carrying a staff and an armorial banner, each accompanied by a ribbon of blackletter text that curls up through the foliage. One banner shows 3 crowns above the young king in the rose coloured doublet, whose scroll reads "Kunig Artus"; beside him a long bearded emperor in an ermine lined mantle stands under a banner of eagle and fleur de lis with the words "Keisser Karelus meini". At the far left a bearded man in a leaf patterned coat rests his hand on an oval shield painted with a rampant beast, and at the far right a knight in banded plate armour holds a standard charged with a cross. Behind and between them the ground is filled edge to edge with rose bushes: open 5 petal blooms, tight buds, and broad serrated leaves, with a small brown bird perched on a stem in the centre. A striped turf band runs along the bottom, scattered with clover, strawberry leaf and small wildflowers in the millefleurs manner. There is no formal border; the flowering thicket simply runs to the selvedge on all 4 sides, which is exactly how the medieval originals were composed.

Colors

The ground is a deep teal green, cool and slightly blue in daylight, and it does the work of a night sky behind everything else. Over it the foliage moves through sage, olive and a yellowed moss green, so the leaves separate from the field without shouting. The flowers are the second voice: a soft rose pink shaded to coral at the petal edge, repeated in the young king's tunic, in the emperor's mantle lining and in the piping along the banderoles, which ties the figures to the garden around them. Cream and old ivory carry the inscription ribbons, the armour highlights and the ermine, giving the eye a resting place. Blues appear twice over, first in the turban and figured coat at the left, where a pale cornflower blue sits against the darker field, and again in the knight's steel at the right, where blue grey stripes run down the plate. Small accents of brick red, gold ochre and dark brown pick out the crowns, the shield beast and the outlining of the faces. The palette has the gentle, slightly faded quality that only comes from long settled dyes, and nothing in it fights the wall behind it.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Recorded as French, the panel belongs to the European tapestry tradition rather than to the knotted rug tradition, and the two are built in completely different ways. A tapestry weaver works the coloured wefts back and forth by hand over a cotton warp, packing them down so tightly that the warp disappears and the image is the cloth itself. Every curve, every letter of the Gothic script and every finger on those raised hands has to be built colour by colour, with the weaver turning at the edge of each shape, so a figural panel like this one takes far longer than its size suggests. The quality here shows in the small things: the lettering stays legible across all 4 scrolls, the faces have modelling rather than outline only, and the flower heads keep their roundness instead of going angular. Both faces of the weave are clean, the selvedges are intact, and the panel lies flat and hangs straight. It is a wall piece with a subject worth reading, and that is a rarer thing to find than another medallion.