Foreword
The third volume of the Corpus of Tapestries in the Netherlands, which is now being released as an RKD Study, contains an impressive number of 261 tapestries and 232 smaller tapestry-woven objects that are described in a total of 210 texts. 124 of those are texts about tapestries. Among the smaller objects are a total of 150 cushions, mostly cushions with coats of arms. Also included in this category are table carpets, carpets, tapestry-upholstered furniture, a woven painting, some fragments, valances and cloths. Of the inventoried tapestries and other tapestry-woven objects described in the texts, 35 date from the sixteenth century, 103 date from the seventeenth century and 72 from the eighteenth century. Included are tapestries and objects woven in the Northern and Southern Netherlands, in France, Germany and Scandinavia, and in unspecified production centres. All the objects described are found in various public and partly public collections dispersed across the Netherlands. Zuid-Holland is best represented, with Utrecht, Noord-Holland and Gelderland forming the median and Friesland, Groningen and Drenthe accounting for a smaller presence. The tapestries in the provinces of Zeeland, Noord-Brabant and Limburg have already been described, namely in the first volume of the Corpus of Tapestries in the Netherlands, which was published in 1988.
Several characteristics and particularities about tapestry ownership in the Netherlands emerged from the research for this part of the Corpus of Tapestries in the Netherlands. Our country does not boast any major museum collections, apart from the Rijksmuseum’s collection of tapestries, which is described in the catalogue that was published in 2004 as volume II of the Corpus of Tapestries in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, distributed among various collections in the Netherlands are several absolute masterpieces of international stature and high quality, partly due to the involvement of renowned artists and tapestry weavers. There is also a relative wealth of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rooms containing series of landscape verdures, mostly featuring animals and some figurative scenes, which were woven in the Low Countries. In the Southern Netherlands, Oudenaarde is prominent, while in the Northern Netherlands cities such as Delft, Gouda and Amsterdam were important manufacturing centres. Besides as well as several museums, these series of landscape verdures can often still be found at the location for which they were commissioned, in castles or country estates and even in town houses. Quite unique to the Netherlands are a considerable number of tapestry cushions that have come down over time featuring civic coats of arms, from cities such as Gouda, The Hague, Leiden, Amsterdam and Kampen, predominantly manufactured in the Northern Netherlands, but also in Brussels.
This introduction includes an explication of the technique of tapestry weaving and a brief history of tapestries in Western Europe. This is followed by a survey of the Dutch collections in which tapestries and tapestry-woven objects are housed. These collections fall into two categories: the places where tapestries and tapestry-woven objects are still present in the location for which they were made (in situ), and other historical buildings and museums where objects were later placed and collected. Finally, a section will be dedicated to tapestries in the Dutch national collection.