Marc de Comans (Lubeck, Germany, died after 1643, England)
Chateau and Garden Tapestry: The Surprise, 1625-1650
Wool warp (9 yarns per cm); wool and silk wefts , 467.4 x 381 cm (184 x 150 in.)
General admission for children 17 years and under is always free
This huge tapestry shows an outdoor scene in a formal garden in spring. It is done in an overall color palette of yellow, pale blue, pink, cream, and green, with splashes of red. It is a symmetrical composition anchored by a high latticework arched pergola in the foreground. The fruit and vine covered arch rests on four large, yellow, female sculptures on each side that act as columns with flat ionic capitals and long pedestal bases. A hedged garden stretches into the distance toward a Renaissance palace set high on a stepped podium. In the foreground, two women at the left watch a couple standing at the right near a fountain rising from a square pool. The man pulls his companion away from the fountain that has jets of water coming up from the ground at the periphery of the pool. She leans away from the water and lifts an arm over her head. The instigator of the water jets, a fashionably dressed young man kneeling and manipulating a lever set in the ground at the extreme left foreground, laughs. Another woman just behind him watches the scene. Two hounds wrestle in the right foreground, just out of range of the water. The wide border of this tapestry shows a yellow ground against which festoons and urns of fruits, flowers, and boughs of leaves are arranged into pairs and connected with pink bows and vertical, hanging, pink ribbons.
Little Salon
Commentary
This tapestry depicts a humorous feature of Italian seventeenth century gardens: hidden levers—in this case set off by the figure in the left foreground—that produce jets of water to surprise unsuspecting strollers, like the woman at right with her hand raised in surprise. The Surprise is one of a set of four garden tapestries bought by Isabella Gardner in 1903. This set was once part of the Barberini collection, one of the great Roman collections of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.