This tapestry depicts the goddess Diana bathing with her nymphs after the hunt (in classical legend, Diana was the goddess of the hunt). The scene takes place before the ruins of a classical temple, beyond which an idealized landscape stretches into the distance. The elaborate borders feature a frieze populated by classical deities between cartouches depicting the signs of the zodiac. The floral cartouches in the corners surround images of a phoenix, a bird of paradise, a dolphin, and a lion. The tapestry was one of at least six depicting scenes from classical mythology, after paintings by Laurent de la Hyre (the original painting for this scene is now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu, California). A similar set of tapestries, with variant borders, is recorded in the collection of Louis XIV.

From a set illustrating Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso. The fight between Zerbino, a Christian knight, and Manricardo, King of Tartary, is about to be stopped by the latter’s lady love, Doralice. On the right, Fiordiligi holds Orlando’s horse, Brigliadoro.

Presenting musicians, acrobats, and exotic animals within a fanciful architectural setting, this tapestry is from a set known as the Berain Grotesques, in reference to the pervasive stylistic influence of Jean Berain (1640–1711), who may even have provided preliminary sketches. The lighthearted subject matter and whimsical design contrast with the heavier, ornate style that had characterized French tapestry during the third quarter of the seventeenth century. The series enjoyed immense popularity during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the Beauvais workshop produced many weavings for French clients.

This tapestry is part of four hangings that have been reconstructed from what originally was a set of three tapestries depicting the Nine (or Ten?) Worthies.  The heroes depicted included King Arthur, Joshua, David, Hector of Troy, and Julius Caesar, along with various attendants.  One of the reconstructed hangings (32.130.2b, 47.101.1, 47.152) shows two of the three Hebrew Worthies in their settings and with nearly all of their attendant figures.  Another represents King Arthur (32.130.2a, 47.101.4), one of the three or possibly four figures that appeared in the original tapestry devoted to the Christian Worthies, together with some attendant figures.  The third and fourth pieces represent respectively Hector of Troy (47.101.2) and Julius Caesar (47.101.3), with attendant, taken from a third tapestry that depicted the three Pagan Worthies.  Other fragments (47.101.5 and 49.123), showing architectural elements, bits of landscape, and the incomplete figures of three cardinals and a bishop, all apparently unconnected to those parts of the three original hangings that survive, are preserved separately in the Metropolitan Museum.

As its full-size domed canopy is suspended from the ceiling rather than supported on posts, this tester bed, which bears the stamp of the menuisier Georges Jacob, is a type called lit à la duchesse en impériale. Its original but now fragile hangings, woven in 1782–83 at the Beauvais tapestry manufactory after designs by Jean-Baptiste Huet (1745–1811), have been replaced by modern silk damask, except for the lining of the interior dome. French eighteenth-century beds tended to be lofty, as it was customary to pile them with three or more mattresses filled with straw, wool, horsehair, or feathers. Tobias Smollett (1721–1771) noted in 1766, “French beds are so high, that sometimes one is obliged to mount them by the help of steps.”[1]The custom of receiving visitors while reposing in a large and elegantly fitted out bed was practiced in France during the eighteenth century mostly by aristocratic women. The Museum’s imposing piece of furniture with its exquisitely carved floral decoration, the work of an unknown carver, must have formed a splendid backdrop for such official calls or congratulatory visits. In 1791 the bed is documented as standing in the large bedchamber of Guyonne-Marguerite de Durfort de Lorge, duchesse de Choiseul-Praslin (1737–1806), at her Parisian home, the Hôtel de Belle Isle. Following the turmoil of the Revolution and the political changes of the early nineteenth century, the bed was sold in Paris in 1830. It became part of the famous collections at Hamilton Palace, South Lanarkshire, Scotland, the residence of Alexander Hamilton Douglas, tenth Duke of Hamilton (1767–1852), where it was placed in one of the state rooms. The duke’s grandson sold the contents of the palace, including the bed, at a highly anticipated auction that took place in 1882. Through the intermediation of several dealers, the bed was acquired in 1897 by the financier and railroad executive George J. Gould (1864–1923). His wife, the former actress Edith M. Kingdon (1864–1921), used it in her bedroom of their New York town house.[Daniëlle Kisluk-Grosheide, 2010]Footnotes:[1] Tobias George Smollett. Travels through France and Italy. London, 1766. New ed.: Introduction by James Morris. Travellers' Classics 11. Fontwell, Sussex, 1969, p. 43.

This tapestry depicts the gods Apollo and Diana killing the children of Niobe as a punishment for the affront that Niobe had caused their mother, Latona. The set from which this panel derived was known as "The Horses" because the mythological subjects were a thinly veiled pretext to depict a sequence of splendid horses in dynamic action. The designs were created by Francis Cleyn, a native of Rostock who worked at the Danish court before traveling to England in the early 1620s. He was appointed official designer to the Mortlake tapestry works in 1625, and during the following decade provided a sequence of new design series, including "The Horses." Two high-quality weavings of this subject were provided to Charles I before 1637, of which only one fragment survives (Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Following the Civil War, the Mortlake works continued to weave from Cleyn's designs, but these later weavings lacked the quality of materials and skilled craftsmanship that characterized earlier production.This set was woven sometime in the 1650s or 1660s for Henry Mordaunt, second earl of Peterborough, whose arms appear in the upper border, along with those of his wife, Penelope O'Brien.

A study of paintings from Iran indicates that in the early sixteenth century the typical waist girdle was a leather strap with metal plaques, which then gave way to a narrow textile band with gold fasteners.¹ By the seventeenth century, a long and wide sash wrapped and knotted around the waist was customary.² These sashes had a central field of narrow stripes with decorative panels of flowering plants at either end; they were tied so that these floral panels were visible. The sash was an indispensable accessory and a tool for projecting the status of the wearer. Thomas Herbert, part of an English embassy to Iran in the late 1620s, remarked on both the length of these sashes and the meaningful variation in their materials: "Their waists are girt with fine towels [a plain fabric band worn under the sash] of silk and gold about 8 yards long; those and the sashes distinguish the quality of those that wear them; dukes and other of the noble sort have them woven with gold, merchants and qezelbash with silver; of silk and wool those of inferior rank."³ By this measure, an Iranian sash in the Museum's collection (see MMA 33.80.18), with its gold ground extending the whole of its almost fourteen-foot length, must have been worn by a rich and important personage.⁴ A further mark of its quality is the fact that the back of the sash is well finished. Similar sashes were also worn in the Ottoman and Mughal realms on either side of the Safavid cultural sphere. By the late seventeenth century this fashion had spread to parts of eastern Europe such as Poland and Russia, where textiles imported from Iran and Turkey had become status symbols worn by courtiers. Persian sashes became a requisite part of the wardrobe for noblemen of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, at the crossroads between the Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire, and the European Holy Roman Empire. The aristocracy’s entire style of dress was influenced by fashions from the Safavid and Ottoman courts, but the sash retained its popularity long after other features became more Westernized. By the eighteenth century the demand for silk sashes, or kontusz (and thus known as kontusz sashes) worn over an outer coat, became so great in Poland that domestic manufactories, called persiarnie, were established.⁵ One of the finest eighteenth-century producers was the establishment founded in the city of Sluck, east of Warsaw, by an Armenian named Jan Madjarski and his son Leo⁶ The Madjarskis clearly took great pride in their work and "signed" their sashes with woven inscriptions on the end panels (see MMA 49.32.48), where they were certain to be seen. These sashes were normally worn folded in half lengthwise and then wound around the waist. An innovation introduced by the Polish manufacturers was the production of a two-color, double-sided main field that enabled the wearer to extend his wardrobe by folding and tying his sash up to four different ways.⁷ From the mid-seventeenth century European observers used the word shawl, derived from the Persian sha¯l, to describe the oblong textiles woven of very fine wool that were used by Iranian men as waist sashes and by Indian men as shoulder coverings. By the late eighteenth century the white "Kashmir" shawls with colorful pinecone or paisley motifs at each end became the de rigueur fashion accessory for European women (for an unusual and creative use of a shawl as headgear, see MMA 45.59.3). An early reference to shawls imported to England from the Kashmir region appears in 1767, in the correspondence of British author Laurence Sterne.⁸ French Empress Josephine is often credited with popularizing the trend at the turn of the nineteenth century and is said to have owned more than fifty expensive imported shawls. During the early nineteenth century Kashmiri shawl makers began to replace the plain white field of these textiles with bold colors or stripes. At the same time, Europeans started weaving shawls in an attempt to meet the increased demand for the fashionable accessories. Traditional Kashmir shawls were patterned using a twill tapestry technique, which was extremely time consuming. Driven to make shawls more quickly, European makers normally employed faster weaving techniques, but a few Russian makers retained the tapestry method.⁹ Several of the Russian workshops were run by female members of the landed gentry, who took advantage of the inexpensive serf labor available to them to produce these amazingly fine textiles as in this example¹⁰ In this case, the flowers in the pinecone shapes at each end of the shawl can be identified as European species such as poppies, roses, and cornflowers; there even appears to be a type of tuber vegetable anchoring the individual motifs. The vivid stripes of this shawl may have been inspired in part by the colorful men’s sashes being produced in Poland, Russia, and France, which themselves had been inspired by Iranian and Indian precursors. [Melinda Watt, adapted from Interwoven Globe, The Worldwide Textile Trade, 1500-1800/ edited by Amelia Peck; New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven: distributed by Yale University Press, 2013] 1. Goetz, "The History of Persian Costume," p. 2247.  2. Scarce, "Vesture and Dress: Fashion, Function, and Impact," pp. 36, 42.  3. Herbert, Travels in Persia, 1627–1629, p. 232.  4. Sir Jean Chardin, writing in the 1660s, noted the large costs incurred by courtiers to maintain their wardrobes. Quoted in Floor, "Economy and Society: Fibers, Fabrics, Factories," p. 22. 5. Poskrobko-Strze˛ciwilk, "Polish Kontusz Sashes in the Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art," pp. 19, 23. I am grateful to Ms. Poskrobko-Strze˛ciwilk for her generosity in sharing her time to discuss this research.  6. Ibid., p. 24.  7. Ibid., p. 32.  8. See Irwin, The Kashmir Shawl, p. 19.  9. Catalogue number 101C is composed of twill-woven solid-color stripes and tapestry-woven patterned areas; these components were woven separately and then skillfully joined.  10. The two most prominent female-owned manufactories in Russia were those of Nadezhda Merlina (active in Nizhny Novgorod, 1806–34) and Vera Andreevna Eliseeva; see Cooper, "Luxury Textiles from Feudal Workshops: 19th Century Russian Tapestry-Woven Shawls," pp. 224–35. For a shawl signed by the Merlina workshop (very similar to this shawl), see Metropolitan Museum, acc. no. 1972.175.

designed ca. 1535, woven late 17th century, Paris

designed ca. 1535, woven late 17th century, Paris