The Tapestry Book

In 1912, America was awakening to the beauty of European tapestries. Wealthy collectors were importing medieval and Renaissance works, but many lacked the knowledge to distinguish the sublime from the merely old. Helen Churchill Candee wrote this book to change that, offering a cultivated American reader the tools to understand and appreciate what they were acquiring. Candee traces tapestry from the ancient world through the Gothic masterpieces of the fifteenth century to the Renaissance workshops of Brussels and Flanders. She writes with the certainty of a woman who has studied these works in situ, visited the great collections, and formed definite opinions about what constitutes beauty in woven form. The book captures a transitional moment in American taste, when decorative arts were shedding their merely functional reputation and taking their place alongside painting and sculpture as legitimate art. Candee advocates for direct engagement with tapestries in museums and private collections, arguing that books can only prepare the eye; only looking at actual works can train it. For readers interested in early twentieth-century American culture, the history of collecting, or decorative arts, this volume preserves a particular moment when America was learning to see European craftsmanship through fresh eyes.