Summary

Tapestry, wool and silk, 7 warps per cm, The Building of Thebes from a series of four of The Story of Cadmus, probably Michiel Wauters or Wauters, Cockx and de Wael, Antwerp, c. 1675 – 1700. In the foreground Cadmus, dressed in armour and a red cloak, sits at the foot of a tree with his shield on the ground beside him and a drawing board on his knee, in discussion with his attendant who sits beside him wearing a blue tunic and holding a staff. The two men are directing the building activities of five men on the right hand side of the tapestry who measure blocks of stone and carry materials, with a large palace or temple under construction in the background. To the left of the tree where Cadmus sits a landscape stretches into the distance. The upper and lower borders are composed of swags of flowers on a pale brown ground, with urns and military trophies. The tapestry has no side borders.

Full description

After the abduction of his sister Europa by Jupiter (see 500317.1) Cadmus was sent in search of her by their father Agenor, and warned that he would be exiled if he failed to bring her back (see 500317.2). Cadmus searched in vain, as no-one can find the retreat of the Gods, and finally appealed to the Delphic oracle, asking where he could settle as he could not return home to the wrath of his father. The oracle replied that when he saw a heifer unmarked by toil he should follow it, and found a city where the cow laid down; the place would be named Boetia, and the city Thebes. After leaving the cave of the oracle Cadmus soon saw the heifer, and when she lay down on the grass he kissed the soil and looked around joyfully at the woods and mountains of his new home. Wishing to give thanks for his good fortune Cadmus sought a fresh spring of water to make a sacrifice, and accidentally disturbed a monstrous serpent which slaughtered all his men before Cadmus killed it. The killing of the serpent is the subject of another tapestry in the series that does not appear at Lyme. The Goddess Minerva then appeared to Cadmus and told him to sew the serpent’s teeth like seeds, and there sprung up an army of warlike men; they immediately fell upon one another until there were only five left, and these helped Cadmus to build Thebes. The tapestry shows Cadmus and his attendant (who also appears with Cadmus and his father in the previous tapestry in the series, 500317.2) consulting an architectural plan as they oversee the building of Thebes, and the five men at work represent the five surviving warriors that sprung from the serpent’s teeth. The three tapestries at Lyme are part of a larger series of designs telling the story of Prince Cadmus, the son of Agenor, King of Tyre in Phoenicia. Cadmus was the founder of the city of Thebes, and is credited with bringing the Phoenician alphabet to Greece; he was also the grandfather of Actaeon. He is mentioned in various Greek sources including the ‘Histories’ of Herodotus, but the source for the tapestry series is Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’. The subject of the first tapestry in the series is the abduction of Europa, Cadmus’s sister, by Jupiter disguised as a bull. Agenor then sent Cadmus in search of her, and this is the subject of the second tapestry. Despairing of finding his sister, Cadmus appealed to the Delphic Oracle, who told him that when he saw a cow unmarked by toil he should follow it, and found a city where it lay down. This was to be the City of Thebes, and the building of Thebes is the subject of the third tapestry at Lyme. In 1930 Henry Marillier attributed the ‘Cadmus’ series, along with a number of other late seventeenth-century tapestries with stories from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, to English workshops of the late seventeenth century, on the basis that these tapestries occurred in large numbers in English collections and virtually nowhere else. He gave them the generic title of the ‘English Metamorphoses’ (Marillier 1930, pp. 70-75, 79-91). Evidence came to light in the 1930s that some of the tapestries Marillier had thought were English had in fact been made in Antwerp, at the workshops of Michiel and Philip Wauters (Denucé 1931; Crick-Kuntziger 1935; Denucé 1936). Nonetheless Marillier maintained that the large and loosely associated ‘Metamorphoses’ series was English, based on a series of the ‘Story at Cadmus’ at Chirk Castle which, uniquely, bore the mark of a red cross on a white shield used at Mortlake and the workshops that sprung up in the London area after 1660 (Marillier 1940). In 1983 Wendy Hefford subjected the ‘Metamorphoses’ tapestries and the known documentary evidence to a detailed study, and concluded that the design series had originated in Antwerp with the Wauters firm, who produced them largely for the English market, and that English tapestry producers had subsequently copied the designs and produced their own versions, thus explaining the existence of examples with both English and Antwerp marks (Hefford 1983; see also Brosens 2008, pp. 199-206; Hefford 2010, pp. 275-282). Hefford noted that two sets of cartoons of the ‘Story of Cadmus’ appear in the posthumous inventory of Michiel Wauters in 1679, and showed that the surviving subjects in the ‘Cadmus’ sets at Lyme Park, Chirk Castle and elsewhere correspond closely to those listed in the correspondence of the Wauters firm (Hefford 1983, pp. 99-101). Hefford identified various physical differences between ‘Metamorphoses’ tapestries produced in Antwerp and the English versions: the former were woven with a slightly coarser weave, and included a red dye that tended to fade, whereas the English reds remained bright; and in the English versions the designs were usually woven in reverse. The set at Lyme Park has the warp count and the colouring typical of the Antwerp weavings, and moreover its designs are in the opposite direction to the ‘Cadmus’ set at Chirk that bears the English mark. ‘Cadmus’ tapestries were produced by Michiel Wauters in the 1670s and the series continued to be woven after his death in 1679 when the family firm was run by his daughter Maria Anna Wauters and her two brothers-in-law Jeremias Cockx and Cornelis de Wael. Six sets of ‘Cadmus’ tapestries were shipped to England from Antwerp between 1682 and 1689, and thereafter production seems to have slowed down in Antwerp, whilst English versions were produced until at least the end of the century (Hefford 1983, p. 101). Hefford attributes the design of the ‘Metamorphoses’ tapestries to Daniel Janssens (1636-1682) an artist and tapestry designer from Mechelen in the Southern Netherlands, a town which specialised in producing designs for tapestry. Janssens is known to have provided a number of sets of tapestry designs to Antwerp weavers in the late seventeenth century, including for the Wauters firm who produced the ‘Cadmus’ series. Among his known designs are the ‘Seven Liberal Arts’ (a set survives at Cotehele House, inv. 348261), which are stylistically similar to the ‘Cadmus’ series and the other ‘Metamorphoses’ tapestries. Four ‘Cadmus’ tapestries of English manufacture are at Chirk Castle (mentioned above) with the subjects ‘The Rape of Europa’, ‘Cadmus and the Dragon’, ‘The Building of Thebes’ and ‘The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia’. Numerous other examples were recorded by Marillier in the early twentieth century, of both English and Antwerp manufacture. Other tapestries from the larger ‘Metamorphoses’ series within National Trust collections include a group at Cotehele House in Cornwall (no. 348258). The Lyme 'Cadmus' tapestries are recorded in their current locations in the 1929 inventory of the house, where they are described as of Mortlake manufacture, their subjects identified as ‘A Scene from the Legend of “Europa and the Bull”’, valued at £1,000, ‘Solomon directing the building of the Temple’, valued at £1,750, and ‘The building of the Temple’, valued at £750 (Biffard, Robertson and Lucy 1929, p. 31). Tapestries are mentioned on the walls of the Ante Room and the Stag Parlour in the 1879 inventory as well but their subjects are not identified (Sutton 1879, pp. 29, 36). The tapestries are likely to have been introduced by Thomas Legh between 1814, when Lewis Wyatt designed the rooms, and c. 1860 when Catherine Vaughan painted a watercolour of the Stag Parlour showing Agenor Sending Cadmus to find Europa in place on the north wall. Photographs of c.1900 and 1904 (the latter taken by Country Life) show the same. James Croston, in his Historic Sites of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1883, refers to ‘the rape of Europa’ in the Ante Room. His description of Lyme is prior to 1879 and probably during the ownership of Thomas Legh (d. 1857). (Helen Wyld, 2011)