Page:Textile fabrics; a descriptive catalogue of the collection of church-vestments, dresses, silk stuffs, needle-work and tapestries, forming that section of the Museum (IA textilefabricsde00soutrich).pdf/546



PART THE SECOND.

Tapestry.

1296.

Pieces of Tapestry Hanging, figured with poetic pastoral scenes. Flemish, perhaps wrought at Audenaerde, in the first half of the 16th century. 29 feet 4 inches by 11 feet.

Soon after the early part of the 16th century, there sprang up throughout Europe a liking for pastoral literature as seen in Virgil's eclogues: poets sung their dreams of the bliss to be found in rustic life, in which sports and pastimes, amid well-dressed revelry and music, with nought of toil or drudgery belonging to it, formed the yearly round; and in summer tide, nobles and their ladies loved to rove the woods and fields, and play at gentle shepherdism. How such frolics were carried out we learn from the tapestry before us, which, in many of its features, is near akin to those low reliefs of the same subject that adorn the walls in the court-yard of the curious and elaborately ornamented Hotel de Bourgtheroud, at Rouen.

At the left-hand side, lying on a flowery bank, is a gentleman shepherd, whose broad-toed shoes and thick cloth leggings, fastened round the knees and about the ancles, are rather conspicuous. On the brim of his large round white hat is a sort of square ticket, coloured. From his waist hangs a white satchel, bearing outside various appliances,