A fine 17th century Flemish tapestry border

Brussels, circa 1620-1640

Woven in silk and wool with a design of a lion’s head and paws within a scallop shell flanked by volutes, dolphins and acanthus leaves, this panel is likely to have originally formed the lower border of a tapestry from the set ‘The Story of Decius Mus’, designed by Peter Paul Rubens in 1616-1617 and first woven in the workshop of Jan Raes II. Two sets, one woven with the addition of gold thread, that reside in the Spanish royal collection are framed with the same border, as are examples in Vienna, Stockholm, and Liechtenstein. As Concha Herrero Carretero wrote in her essay on the set for the catalogue of the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition ‘Tapestry in the Baroque - Threads of Splendor’, publ. MMA, 2007, pp. 95-105, … ‘Although no sketch by Rubens is known for the borders of the Decius Mus series, those that appear on the Spanish royal collection sets also appear on several other early weavings of the designs, which suggests that these borders may have been created for this series and subsequently associated with it…’ and, also, it is ‘possible that Rubens provided preliminary sketches for some of the motifs in the borders (…) and that the designs for those borders were worked up by artists who specialized in the creation of these framing elements’.

Sets were woven throughout the 1620s and 1630s, not only in the Raes workshops but also those of François van den Hecke and Gerard van der Strecken.

38cm (15”) high and 221.5cm (87¼”) wide.