French Tapestries Textiles in the J. Paul Getty Museum

This lavishly-illustrated book is a survey of the Getty Museum's seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French textiles--one of the world's finest collections. Featuring twenty-five extraordinary tapestries woven at the Gobelins and Beauvais manufacturies, the catalogue also highlights three carpets, two knotted-pile screens, and two sets of embroidered bed hangings, one of which is the only complete lit á la duchesse surviving from the period. Each entry includes complete historical and physical information on the piece and an accompanying commentary provides information on the literary, historical, and visual source of design imagery as well as the context of each textile's commission and production. For lovers of French decorative arts and connoisseurs of textiles, this beautiful book is must reading.