Made at Williamsbridge for the Chi Phi Chapter House, at Ithaca, New York. Notice the woven mark of the Baumgarten atelier 
What Are Tapestries? 
By GEORGE LELAND HUNTER 
PART II. 
I T is not necessary to go to France to see tapestry 
looms in operation. At Williamsbridge on the 
Bronx are twenty-five looms and sixty weavers, 
established there by the late William Baumgarten. 
Among Americans for whom tapestries have been 
woven there are P. A. B. Widener, W. L. Elkins, 
Mrs. Elliott F. Shepard, W. W. Harrison, D. B. 
Wesson, Jacob H. Schiff, Governor Murphy of New 
Jersey, the Rhode Island State House, James L. 
Flood, Charles M. Schwab, Oliver Harriman, Jr., 
Mrs. C. P. Huntington, Mrs. Marcus Daly, J. Pier- 
pont Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, William Rocke¬ 
feller, Mrs. Vanderbilt, John D. Crimmins, Rudolph 
Spreckels, Marshall Field, George S. Isham, Harold 
McCormick, W. B. Leeds, Charles T. Yerkes, F. W. 
Woolworth, Mrs. Herman Oelrichs. 
1 he Baumgarten exhibit received a Grand Prize 
at the St. Louis Exposition, and the tapestries woven 
at Williamsbridge are inferior to none. 
The manager of the atelier is M. Foussadier, who 
was foreman at the Royal Windsor Tapestry Works 
established in 1876 under the patronage of the Royal 
Family. This enterprise collapsed in 1887 as the 
result of too many large-salaried artistic directors. 
In 1893 M. Foussadier came to New York on the 
invitation of Mr. Baumgarten and set up one small 
loom in the shop at 321 Fifth Avenue. The first 
piece of tapestry produced was a chair seat, still in the 
possession of the Baumgarten family. The second 
piece, a duplicate of the first, is in the Field Museum 
at Chicago. 
Other looms in operation to-day are those at 
Merton in England; at Paris, Aubusson and Felletin 
in France; at Berlin, Germany; and many individ¬ 
ual as well as school looms in Sweden, Norway and 
other European countries. At the Pans Exposition 
of 1900 modern tapestries were exhibited from 
Hungary, Norway, Sweden, Germany, Servia, Italy, 
Finland, Roumania, Greece, and Austria. Some of 
these were woven on high-warp looms. 
The only non-French tapestries to receive a Grand 
Prize at this Exposition were six designed by Burne- 
Jones on the subject of the Holy Grail, and woven at 
Merton in England, on the high-warp looms estab¬ 
lished in 1881 by William Morris. It is interesting 
to note that Morris painted the first cartoon and 
wove the first tapestry with his own hands. I saw 
the cartoon last year in the shop of Morris & Co. of 
London. The atelier is still under the supervision 
of Mr. Dearie, who was with Morris from the begin¬ 
ning and who designed many of the floral and verdure 
details of the tapestries, and was responsible for the 
coloring of many, the cartoons of Burne-Jones being 
in a tinted wash without the slightest color suggestion. 
Morris ranked tapestry as the “noblest of the 
weaving arts” and sought the effect of ancient arras. 
Contemporary Gobelin work he despised as “ no 
longer a fine art, but as an upholsterer’s toy.” He 
wished the figures to be “ arranged in planes close to 
one another, and the cloth pretty much filled with 
them, a manner which gives a peculiar richness to 
the designs of the first years of the sixteenth century, 
the opposing fault to this being the arrangement of 
figures and landscapes in a picture proper, with 
foreground, middle distance and distance,” which 
gave, he thought, “a poor filled-up look. ” 
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