Late 16th Century Game Park Tapestry
A large 16th Century Flemish game park tapestry woven in wools and silks and showing an extensive park landscape with courtly figures reading music and playing instruments to the foreground and further figures hunting game in the wooded landscape, a fantastical castle surrounded by a moat and formal gardens draws the eye in to the middle distance and with further buildings in the hillside beyond.
Provenance
Chawton House, Hampshire. A fine 16th Century Manor House, and former home of Jane Austen’s brother, Edward.
Shown here hanging above the fireplace in the Library.
These small figure designs of Game Park tapestries were woven throughout northern Europe by the late 16th century and were woven by Southern Netherlandish weavers, Frans Spiering who relocated from Antwerp to the northern Netherlands, and there were others in Brussels, Enghien and Oudenaarde including anonymous weavers in London. The quality of the weave varied from one weaving centre to the other. The subjects could be mythological or secular. With the importance of garden design at this period, they were often depicted as formal arrangements within these landscape settings with the elegantly dressed figures in the foreground, as in the present example. For an example of a Game Park tapestry of similar quality of weave and attention to detail, see a Classical subject of ‘Pluto and Proserpina with Falconry’, woven in Brussels, circa 1600, under the direction of Erasmus I de Pannemaker, based on a design by Adriaen Collaert (1560-1618), after Hans Bol (1534-1593), within an especially detailed border, in the Art Institute of Chicago (384 by 345cm: Inv.1896.148)
