April from a set of The Months of Lucas
Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins|Michel Audran|Comte de Toulouse|Master of the Months of Lucas|Joseph Yvart|Charles Chastelain|Louis de Boulogne the Younger|Pierre Josse Perrot
designed ca. 1535, woven 1732–37 · Wool, silk (20-21 warps per inch, 8-9 per cm.) · European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
This tapestry was part of a set of twelve celebrating courtly pastimes, each dedicated to a month of the year. Here, courtiers enjoy the mild mid-spring weather of April; they venture out of the castle to go boating, gather flowers, and make music with a recorder, a lute and a dulcimer. In contrast with these leisurely dalliances, a shepherd leading his flock to the fields and a maid milking toward the left hint at busy agricultural life reawakening after atrophied winter. October, from the same series, is on display nearby. Though woven in eighteenth-century Paris, these hangings were designed after a sixteenth-century Netherlandish tapestry set (now lost) in the French royal collection. The resulting works winningly combine a Renaissance sensibility in subject matter, compositional style, and clothing fashions with a lush Rococo border, a rainbow palette, and virtuosi weaving techniques more typical of 1730s France.
- Artist
- Manufacture Nationale des Gobelins|Michel Audran|Comte de Toulouse|Master of the Months of Lucas|Joseph Yvart|Charles Chastelain|Louis de Boulogne the Younger|Pierre Josse Perrot
- Date
- designed ca. 1535, woven 1732–37
- Medium
- Wool, silk (20-21 warps per inch, 8-9 per cm.)
- Culture
- French, Paris
- Department
- European Sculpture and Decorative Arts
- Credit line
- Gift of John D. Rockefeller Jr., 1944
