International studio (52.1914)

The Brooklyn Tapestry Exhibition

THE MAIN ROOM


THE BROOKLYN TAPESTRY EXHI-
BITION
BY GEORGE LELAND HUNTER
The tapestry exhibition recently held
in the Brooklyn Museum, officially known as the
Museum of the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and
Sciences, was quite as much a display of architec-
ture and paintings as of tapestries. When the
trustees of the Institute, at the suggestion of their
president, Mr. A. Augustus Hearly, employed me
to assemble and arrange a loan exhibition of tap-
estries, I determined that the virtues of tapestry
texture should be brought out fully and by contrast
with plaster and stone and paint, and that the
claim of tapestries to the title of “ the fundamental
wall decoration” should be conclusively demon-
strated. Whether I was successful in this, with
the very efficient and sympathetic assistance of
the curator-in-chief, Mr. William H. Fox, and of
the assistant curator of fine arts, Mr. Andre E.
Rueff, is for others to decide. What I wish to
bear testimony to is that the architects of the
Museum, Messrs. McKim, Mead & White, should
feel highly complimented by the way in which the
virtues of their classic architecture were empha-
sized by the tapestries that it backgrounded.
The Dome Room, hung across the corners with
four tapestries of bold colour and design, was a
superb demonstration of the extent to which the
charms of huge columns and massive entablature,
as well as of statuary, are enhanced by the warm

contrast of pictures in cloth. On the side of the
Dome Room, shown in our illustration, with a
fifteenth-century Trojan War tapestry on the left
and a seventeenth-century Abundance tapestry on
the right, was a vista through rooms devoted to
paintings. On the opposite side of the Dome
Room was a vista through the Main Room (45 by
no feet) devoted to tapestries, and through two
smaller rooms, to the gallery containing the fam-
ous Hainauer Crucifixion. The other tapestries in
the Dome Room were one picturing a scene from
the story of the shepherds, Gombaut and Mace,
and a seventeenth-century reproduction of the
Blinding of Elymas, one of the ten Acts of the
Apostles tapestries designed by Raphael for Pope
Leo X shortly after the beginning of the sixteenth
century, and woven in Brussels by Pieter Van
Aelst. This Elymas tapestry, though of com-
paratively coarse texture, and of coarsened design,
with a coat of arms substituted for the Latin
inscription of the original, lost nothing by con-
trast with its three companions in the Dome
Room, and attracted especial attention because of
its claim to be the creation of the genius of the
greatest draughtsman the world has ever known.
The tapestry in the Dome Room most generally
admired was the one symbolizing Abundance, with
the Latin word ABUNDANTIA woven on the
shield in the top border, the name of the designer,
L. Van Schoor, woven in the panel, and the name
of the maker, A. Avwercx, woven in the bottom
selvage. The blues in the tapestry are gorgeous

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