Aubusson Tapestries 
By GEORGE LELAND HUNTER 
PART I. 
A FINE set of Aubusson tapestries to cover five 
pieces of furniture—sofa, two arm chairs, 
two side chairs—weighs ten pounds, meas¬ 
ures nine square yards, and is worth from ^i,ooo to 
^5,000. That is to say, if you bought it by weight, 
you would pay from ^100 to ^^500 a pound; if )ou 
bought it by area, you would pay from $iiO to $560 
a square yard. 
To an Aubusson set worth ^1,400 correspond a 
Belleville set at ^950 and a Nimes set at $700. 
Tapestries like these, antique as well as modern, 
come frequently to the auction room. All are usually 
grouped under the name Aubusson, together with 
the cheap machine imitations. The cheap ones are 
apt to sell for too much; the fine ones for too little. 
To enable the amateur to tell the real from the imi¬ 
tation and to know when a bargain is before him is 
the object of this article. 
The finest furniture coverings in the world are 
woven in the little town of Aubusson, in France, 207 
miles by rail south of Paris. Tradition says that 
the industry was established there in the year of 
our Lord 732 by stragglers from the Saracen army, 
which Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, 
defeated near Tours, thus saving Europe to Christi¬ 
anity. And it is certain that as late as 1585, the 
weavers were called tappiciers sarrazinois (Saracen 
makers of tapestry), which was the term used also in 
Flanders and Picardy to designate workers on the 
low-warp loom. 
That Aubusson, with its neighbor Felletin, was 
ever distinguished as originator of large picture wall- 
tapestries, like those made at Arras and Paris and 
Brussels, in the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries, is improbable. The attempt of M. Cyp- 
rien Perathon, the historian of Aubusson, to attribute 
to the looms of his native place the famous Lady 
with the Unicorn series at the Cluny, does more 
credit to his local patriotism than to his scholarship. 
Although mural picture tapestries have been woven 
at Aubusson for centuries, and although reproduc¬ 
tions of the finest products of seventeenth and 
eighteenth century looms are woven there to-day, 
the fame of Aubusson depends principally on the 
seats and backs and rugs (the rugs in the same 
weave but heavier) to which it has given its name— 
aubusson being a general term for hand-woven tap¬ 
estry furniture-coverings and flat rugs in the French 
I a, an Aubusson chair back; ib, reverse of la. Notice that tlie pattern is reversed, and that the loose threads make 
various angles w’ith the warp. In broches like Belleville and Nimes tapestries, the floats are all parallel with the weft, 
i. e., perpendicular to the warp 
150 
