Constance Watson

Tapestries

They're so unfashionable their prices have plummeted, but see one close up and marvel at its glory

It is rare nowadays to see someone pull out a half-finished tapestry from their handbag and get on with their stitching. In fact, tapestry is becoming increasingly unfashionable; ‘nomadic murals’ (as architect Le Corbusier described them) are often relics of the distant past. So much so that they have plummeted in price.

‘People are streaming into contemporary art, and tapestry is becoming more of a niche market,’ says Marcus Radecke, Christie’s European head of furniture. ‘Whereas a large Brussels baroque tapestry might have fetched £50,000 in the 1980s or 1990s, nowadays it would sell for £20,000 or £25,000.’

That may still sound a lot for woven thread, but it’s a long way short of the record-breaking $1.2 million paid for ‘Wild Men’, a Swiss medieval scene sold at Sotheby’s in 1981. Another set called the Caesar tapestries was commissioned by Henry VIII. There were ten pieces, each 9 feet high and 25 feet long, and when hung in a row, they stretched 259 feet. The set was valued at £5,022 a century after the monarch’s death, but sadly it disappeared at some point in the 19th century.

The price that tapestries could fetch were, and still can be, absurd. But see one up close and you will marvel at its glory. (The V&A has a fantastic collection, for starters, and I implore you to go and see them.)

Though domesticity is undergoing something of a renaissance — home-furnishing tycoons such as Cath Kidston have helped to make it fashionable again to think about what’s on your walls and how fabrics look — tapestries seem to have been forgotten.

But they were to the medieval home what Kidston’s Aga is to her kitchen.

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