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.

This tapestry is one from a nine-piece series known as the Hunters’ Chase. Curiously-enough, given its secular subject-matter, the original edition was commissioned by the Dutch Church in London, in 1645. Francis Clein designed four of the pieces in the series from scratch; the other five, including News of the Stag, were based on existing tapestry designs by the great 16th-century artist Bernard van Orley for his influential, Brussels-woven Hunts of Maximilian. Hunters’ Chase proved incredibly popular for Mortlake, resulting in much-needed commissions for the floundering manufactory: at least 8 different re-editions were woven during the following decades, including that of which this News of the Stag was part.For more info see Edith Standen, European post-medieval tapestries and related hangings in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985 (vol.2, cat.125) and Wendy Hefford in Tapestry in the Baroque: Threads of Splendor, MMA exh.cat. 2007 (p.182).

1650~ / 1670~, Mortlake

1650~ / 1670~, Mortlake