For centuries, a king paid far more for a woven hanging than for a painting, often many times the fee of the artist who designed it. That value did not always protect the cloth. Soldiers burned some of these pieces for the gold in their thread, and others, the story goes, were cut up to cover floors and line horse stalls.
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How These Were Chosen
A woven picture begins as a painting. An artist draws a full size model, called a cartoon, and weavers copy it on a loom, passing colored wool and silk through stretched threads one small patch at a time.
The weaving, far more than the design, set the price. A large hanging kept several weavers busy for a year or more, and thread wrapped in silver or gold could multiply the bill. In return, the buyer got a picture as wide as a wall that could travel from palace to palace.
Each entry is one hanging or one set, here for a story of its own, about how it was made or what became of it. The countdown runs back in time across more than eight centuries, from the youngest at number 12 to the oldest at number 1.
12. Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris, The Adoration of the Magi (1890)
The three Magi kneel before the Virgin under a large star in the hanging Edward Burne-Jones designed for the chapel of Exeter College in Oxford, and around them flowers and leaves crowd the ground and fill every gap behind the figures. Those flowers come from a different hand, and the way the work was shared out explains how.
The commission came from the college itself. In 1886 its rector turned to two former students, Burne-Jones and his friend William Morris, who had met there as undergraduates.
From there the two friends divided the job. Burne-Jones worked out the scene on a small watercolor model, then drew the full size cartoons, the models the weavers would follow. Morris chose the colors from those cartoons with his assistant John Henry Dearle.
Dearle also drew the flowers and foliage around the figures, and his share can still be told apart by its texture. His flowers repeat in a denser pattern than anything in Burne-Jones's kings, and that change of rhythm marks the seam where one hand gives way to the other.
The weaving itself took two of the project's four years. Three weavers shared the loom at Merton Abbey, the works Morris had set up beside the river Wandle in south London, and they finished in February 1890. The design went back on the loom ten times by 1907, each time with a new border around the same scene.
At a Glance
Artist: Edward Burne-Jones (1833 to 1898), with William Morris and John Henry Dearle, woven by Morris & Co. at Merton Abbey
Made: 1886 to 1890
Medium: Wool, silk and cotton (as recorded for the Musée d'Orsay version)
Size: The Musée d'Orsay version measures 258 × 377.5 cm (101.6 × 148.6 in). Sizes vary with the border.
Where to see it: Exeter College Chapel, Oxford (the 1890 original). Later weavings belong to other museums and churches.
11. Charles-Antoine Coypel, The Story of Don Quixote (1714 to 1794)
At the center of this Gobelins hanging, Sancho Panza, Don Quixote's squire, sits in judgment, and his scene is set inside a wide border of flowers and ornament the way a painting sits in its frame.
Charles-Antoine Coypel painted the scene as one of twenty-eight episodes from Cervantes's novel. He began the series at about twenty, and the royal looms were still weaving it more than forty years after his death, while one part of every hanging kept changing.