Details

Object type

tapestry

Title

Verdure with Thistles

Place Associated

Southern Netherlands, Spanish Netherlands, Brabant, Brussels (probably) (place of manufacture) or Southern Netherlands, Spanish Netherlands, Flanders, Bruges (probably) (place of manufacture)

Date

circa 1490-1520

Materials

wool (warps), wool (wefts), 5-6 warp threads per cm, 2 ply S

Dimensions

overall: 2710 mm x 2490 mm 13400 g (approx wt)

Description

Tapestry woven with wool wefts and wool warps depicting Verdure with Thistles. Three full and one partial large stylized branching thistles with multiple heads with three small clouds above in shades of blue against a dark blue background. Yellow border.

Elizabeth Cleland states that: ‘The device of the thistle was not unusual. Various tapestries employing this motif survive and further examples can be traced from documentary sources: in 1509, Margaret of Austria, the Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, purchased ‘twelve pieces of tapestry with a large thistle’ in Bruges. Nine years later, her nephew Charles of Habsburg (soon to become Holy Roman Emperor), also acquired a complete set of hangings, or chambre, of tapestries with thistles; like his splendid Honours, they were supplied to him by Pieter van Aelst, the key purveyor of tapestries to the great collectors of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It is not recorded whether Charles’s set was, like his Verdures with Armorials, woven with silk as well as wool. Even so, the effect of his Thistles chambre might well have been similar to that of the Burrell’s Verdure with Thistles, especially bearing in mind that, combined with the piece now in [the Danish Museum of Art and Design] Copenhagen, it originally extended at least 5 metres in length, and hung almost from floor to ceiling. This massive scale of vegetation to decorate secular spaces would prove popular, eventually developing into the socalled ‘cabbage leaf’ verdures. The Giant-Leaf Verdure with Deer in the Victoria and Albert Museum, for example, combines massively over-scale thistle plants with other flowering bushes. Although there are no tapestries explicitly described with thistles in the Scottish royal collections, it is worth noting that the 1563 inventory of Mary, Queen of Scots’ tapestry collection did include this type of verdure: ‘one tapestry [set] of great leaves and flowers containing seven pieces’. (Cleland, E. and Karafel, L., (2017). Glasgow Museums: Tapestries from The Burrell Collection, 280.)

Provenance: M & R Stora, Paris; from whom purchased by Sir William Burrell, 30 June 1936, for £550.

Credit Line/Donor

Gifted by Sir William and Lady Burrell to the City of Glasgow, 1944

Collection

Burrell Collection: European Tapestries

ID Number

46.108

Location

Burrell Collection