Note: Restoration to the lower border.

This wonderfully whimsical tapestry was almost certainly woven under the direction of John Vanderbank (active 1683–1717) at the Soho tapestry works in London, England, at the beginning of the 18th century. By the end of the 17th century, the tapestry weavers of Soho and its surrounding streets had begun to usurp the dominance of the Mortlake factory that had been established under royal patronage in 1619. English tapestry production was much less prolific than on the Continent, making surviving pieces such as this very rare.

Vanderbank was the yeoman arras worker at the Great Wardrobe from 1689 until his death in 1717. He may probably be identified with the John Vanderbank who was naturalised in 1700, having been born in Paris, the ‘son of Arnold Vanderbank by Mary, his wife’. The tapestry workshops of the Great Wardrobe were at Vanderbank’s house in Great Queen Street, Holborn, London, (approximately at the present no. 69) from at least 1698 onwards. He was the leading tapestry weaver in England, and by the introduction of the lighter and less formal style, now referred to as chinoiserie, he exercised a powerful influence on the style of the Soho weavers. He is known to have supplied tapestries to the great houses of Boughton in Northamptonshire, Belton in Lincolnshire and Burghley in Cambridgeshire.

The earliest mention of such tapestries is in the 1690s, when Vanderbank supplied a set of nine tapestries ‘in the Indian manner’ to the recently built Kensington Palace in London. A further set of related chinoiserie tapestries entitled ‘The Concert’ are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York (53.165.1). A magnificent set of similar tapestries by Vanderbank, known as the Yale Tapestries, were commissioned by Elihu Yale, the founder of Yale University, and passed by descent with the Earls of Guilford until 1924 before they entered the university’s collection.