Summary

Tapestry, wool and silk 7-8 warps per cm, Marbles from a set of four Children’s Games, Antwerp, workshop of Philip Wauters after a design by Abraham van Diepenbeeck, c. 1660-1680. Four nude children playing a game of marbles in a landscape. There is a row of three marbles on the ground and a boy on the right kneels to flick his marble, watched eagerly by a standing boy next to him. In the centre another boy wearing a yellow drape gestures with his arm, and a fourth boy, on the left, watches the game with one hand on his hip. The game takes place on the bank of a lake or sea which extends into the distance, and the scene is framed by trees on the left and a classical building on the right. A tree grows in the right foreground. To the left a section from another tapestry in the set, ‘Bowling Hoops’ (348275.1), has been attached, and to the right a section from ‘Romulus and Remus Sharing out the Robbers’ Loot’ (348294.1), which hangs in the South Room at Cotehele, has been attached. The borders are composed of a meandering central stem with a variety of leaves and flowers growing from it and tied at intervals with blue ribbons, on a pale yellow ground. There is no right-hand border.

Full description

Games involving marbles, small stones or nuts were common in the ancient world, and many of the games found in early sources continued to be played into the early modern period and beyond (d’Allemagne 1904, pp. 227-8; Opie 1997, pp. 17-18). The boys in this tapestry are probably playing a game known in the twentieth century as ‘Ringy’, and referred to in earlier sources as ‘Ring-Taw’, ‘Long Taw’ and various other names. The rules vary from place to place, but the basic game involves a number of marbles placed or arranged within a large ring drawn on the ground; each player has to shoot his ‘taw’ or firing marble from outside the ring, trying to hit his opponents’ marbles and knock them out of the ring (Opie 1997, pp. 27-33). The boy on the right can be seen holding his marble in his curled forefinger, ready to flick it with his thumb, the established shooting technique for the game. In addition the shooter was required to ‘knuckle down’, that is, rest his knuckle on the ground, and the standing boy who gestures to the ground may be ensuring that the shooter does this. The ring drawn on the ground is not in evidence, but in another weaving of the same tapestry design a line has been drawn on the ground which the shooter kneels behind. The figure group is derived from a print designed by Cornelis Holsteyn, one of a set of six ‘Children’s Games’ or ‘Kinderspel’. Here the gesture of the standing boy in the centre more obviously relates to the hand of the shooter, which is also closer to the ground. Some details have been altered in the tapestry however, most notable the reversal of the design, the addition of a new figure on what is now the left hand side, and the removal of a standing boy who looks out on the left of the original print. These changes can be explained in part with reference to a copy of Holsteyn’s print, published by Cornelis I Danckerts a few years after the original, which is also missing the standing boy looking out on the left. It is possible that this copy was the source for the tapestry design, and that the designer added the boy with his hand on his hip from another source. In addition a fluttering yellow drape has been added to the boy in the centre, possibly for the sake of modesty. Sets of Children’s Games appear in paintings, prints and tapestries with great frequency in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In many cases the representations of individual games relate to carnivalesque imagery, and can be traced back to medieval precedents. The games of children were increasingly invested with moralistic significance relating to the fleeting pleasures of childhood, and individual games could also carry specific meanings; this aspect of the genre was particularly prevalent in Netherlandish art, and reached its fullest expression in Dutch art of the seventeenth century. A parallel genre of Children's Games imagery emerged in the sixteenth century that was closely related to imagery of putti at play found on Roman sarcophagi and wall paintings, and popularised by Italian artists such as Polidoro da Caravaggio and various students of Raphael. The tapestries at Cotehele represent a marriage of the two traditions, the content and the serial nature of the set relating to the Medieval vernacular tradition, but the nude forms of the children referring to antiquity. Images of putti playing games appeared frequently as the main subject for tapestries in the early sixteenth century, and they also featured in the borders of tapestries with more serious historical or religious subjects. In the seventeenth century tapestry sets with playing children were woven in Italy, France, England and Flanders, and Children’s Games prints were produced by artists all over Europe (Davy-Notter and Mathias 1988). The four ‘Children’s Games’ tapestries at Cotehele are partly based on a set of prints called the ‘Verscheyde Aerdig Kinderspel’ (‘various pleasant children’s games’) designed by the Dutch artist Cornelis Holsteyn (1618-1658) (Mulherron and Wyld 2007). Holsteyn’s ‘Kinderspel’ provide the designs for the tapestries of ‘Marbles’ and ‘Fart-in-the-Face’, but no source has yet been found for ‘Hoops’ or ‘Whipping Tops’. It is quite probable however that these two scenes were also taken from prints, either by Cornelis Holsteyn (who is known to have designed at least three different sets with children playing) or another artist. Holsteyn’s ‘Kinderspel’ were widely used as design sources in a variety of media in the late seventeenth century, including painted tiles, popular prints and decorative paintings. The prints were also copied at least four times by other printmakers which substantially widened their circulation, and it is probable that the tapestries were actually made using one of these copy sets. Although the figures were taken in part at least from Holsteyn’s prints the overall conception of the set, and the completed tapestry designs, are the work of another artist, Abraham van Diepenbeeck (1596-1675). In the last two decades of his life Diepenbeeck produced at least 11 sets of tapestries, all but one of which were made for the brothers Michiel and Philip Wauters. In the correspondence of the Wauters firm we find a number of references to their sets of Children’s Games tapestries, including a letter dated 18 March 1676 to the dealers Alexander and William Fourchoudt in Vienna which describes “Children’s Games [Kinderspel], in a landscape with distant views and prospects. The children are designed by Diepenbeecque, as large as life, very curious” (quoted in Denucé 1931, p. 199). The practice of recycling figures from prints in tapestry designs was a common one, not just in Diepenbeeck's work (for example his ‘Riding School’ tapestry designs made for the Wauters brothers, which used figures from prints made Diepenbeeck himself for the Duke of Newcastle in 1658), but in the Flemish tapestry industry as a whole in this period. The ‘Children’s Games’ tapestries were produced in the workshop of Philip Wauters, whose monogram appears on the right-hand galloon of ‘Hoops’ (for the Wauters monogram see Crick-Kuntziger 1935). Philip and Michiel Wauters inherited their father’s tapestry business in 1660 and quickly became the largest tapestry producers in Antwerp, exporting their products throughout Europe. English clients seem to have been particularly fond of the Wauters’ tapestries, and large numbers of them survive in collections in this country – so much so that they were once thought to be English (Marillier 1930, passim). The records of the Wauters firm reveal the high popularity of their ‘Children’s Games’ tapestries, with sets exported to Paris, London, Vienna and Frankfurt (Denucé 1931; Denucé 1936, passim). In spite of the popularity of the ‘Children’s Games’ tapestries in the seventeenth century, the set at Cotehele is one of only two known to survive. A second version of ‘Marbles’ with a different background to the Cotehele version, and a fragment of ‘Whipping Tops’, larger than the fragment at Cotehele but still incomplete, is with the Italian art dealer Fiorini Antichità (Mulherron and Wyld 2007). They are not signed but are in borders that were commonly used by the Wauters. Small changes can be observed in the figures, mainly in details such as the hairstyles and drapery, and the landscape backgrounds are also different in the two versions. The three large panels have hung in the Red Room at Cotehele since at least c. 1840, when they appear in a watercolour by Nicholas Condy. In his accompanying description of the room the Rev. Arundell noted that “the principal subjects of [the tapestries] are the various amusements of boys, in a landscape” (Arundell 1840, p. 25). (Helen Wyld, 2010)