Jacob Jordaens - Tapestry Designs

Tapestry Designs

Jacob Jordaens' most significant body of work were the numerous designs he did for tapestries. As the most lucrative of the arts, tapestries were considered precious throughout the Renaissance and Baroque periods. These large wall hangings had begun to appear on the walls of wealthy European nobility in the fourteenth century. Following the success of the Brussels tapestries woven after the Raphael cartoons, 16th and 17th-century patrons employed artists as tapestry designs; Jacob Jordaens, Peter Paul Rubens and Pietro Cortona flattered patrons allegorically in a manner that would identify them with famous historical or mythological figures, as a form of aristocratic self-promotion. Jordaens found that he was particularly successful in the tapestry ventures. He was especially motivated in this field and his perfected techniques and style earned him numerous commissions for series of tapestries. He was seen as one of the leading tapestry designers of the era.

Jordaens’ process of tapestry creation included a preliminary drawing or sketch of the design. The design then is transferred to larger, more detailed oil sketch for the full-scale cartoon, which the weavers work from directly in weaving tapestry. Jordaens began planning a tapestry by executing a preparatory drawing colored with water-soluble pigments. Although Jordaens did some sketches in oil, most were executed on paper or, later in his career, directly on canvas. Jordaens’ tapestries were made for the aristocracy who placed such high value on them they would carry them with them while they traveled or went on military campaigns as a symbol of their status. Jordaens’ scope of artistic representation was diverse, ranging from mythology, country life, to the history of Charlemagne. It has been noted that Jordaens’ tapestry design incorporated densely organized crowds of figures, packed into a flat two-dimensional picture plane emphasizing surface patterns which resulted in a "woven picture". Just as he liked to crowd his genre paintings he carried forward to his tapestries.

The drawing done for the tapestry Interior of a Kitchen is an example of a part of the process used by Jacob Jordaens. He has used brown ink and applied color over black chalk on paper to layout the still life on a table and how the figures were to be arranged. The final tapestry underwent changes, but the initial design which borrowed elements of still life paintings by the seventeenth century Antwerp artist Frans Snyders, was fairly closely adhered to.