Koenraad Brosens
On Alphonse Wauters’s Les tapisseries bruxelloises (1878)

In 1878 the Belgian historian Alphonse Wauters (1817-1898) published Les tapisseries bruxelloises. Though tapestry scholars have long recognized the importance of Wauters’s pioneering study and have eagerly rifled through the data, they have always felt reluctant to praise Les tapisseries. True, the book has its weaknesses. Wauters used a vast body of new archival documentation, but he often failed to provide accurate references to the documents, which, of course, is frustrating to scholars trying to assess and expand the data presented by Wauters. In addition, there is an apparent lack of cohesion, and the art-historical information on tapestry sets and designers is supported by a mere two illustrations. Les tapisseries bruxelloises, in short, looks dated and worn – and the inclusion of ‘high-warp looms’ in the subtitle only adds to this impression as it is nowadays well-known that Brussels tapissiers used low-warp looms. On the other hand, Les tapisseries is still the only comprehensive monograph on the history of tapestry production and the dyeing industry in Brussels. Thus, while working on my PhD dissertation on the Brussels dyer and tapissier Urbanus Leyniers, Wauters’s book became something of a bible, and I would now like to argue that, shortcomings notwithstanding, Les tapisseries deserves to be enshrined in the Tapestry Hall of Fame.

Alphonse(-Guillaume-Ghislain) Wauters was born in Brussels on 13 April, 1817. At the age of thirteen, he witnessed the uprising against the Dutch king, who ruled the Kingdom of the (Northern and Southern) Netherlands, which led to the independence of Belgium (1830). In 1835 young Wauters enrolled at the ‘Van der Maelen Institute of Geography’; this institute was at the heart of Belgian scientific research as it aimed to fuse geography with zoology, statistics, history and other disciplines. Wauters’s training therefore accounts for his very first publication, the Atlas pittoresque des chemins de fer de Belgique (A Pictorial Atlas of Belgian Railways) (1839), as well as for the remarkable versatility that characterizes his impressive bibliography, which includes articles on the municipal woods of Chimay, Antonello da Messina, and the roots of the Flemish people.
However, as director of the Brussels Municipal Archives – Wauters had been appointed in 1842 – he focused on the political and cultural history of Brussels. The Histoire civile, politique et monumentale de la ville de Bruxelles (1843-45), co-written by Wauters and Alexandre Henne, and the Histoire des environs de Bruxelles: ou description historique des localités qui formaient autrefois l'ammanie de cette ville (1855-1857) remain standard works on the history of Brussels and its suburbs. While working on these and other studies, including articles on Rogier van der Weyden, Pieter de Kempeneer, and Bernard van Orley, Wauters transformed the Brussels Municipal Archives, which had been stored haphazardly in the attic of the Brussels town hall, into a well-organized and accessible tool for scholars. In 1888 and 1894 Wauters disclosed the richness of the Brussels archives by publishing the two volumes of the Inventaire des cartulaires et autres registres faisant partie des archives anciennes de la ville.

The relative abundance of documents relating to Brussels tapestry kept in ‘his’ archives may have inspired Wauters to write a number of articles on the industry. Indeed, Les tapisseries bruxelloises was originally published in five instalments in the Bulletin des Commissions Royales d’Art et d’Archéologie (1876-1878). In other words, at the outset Wauters did not intend to publish a book on Brussels tapestry, and as a result the very first sentence of Les tapisseries reads: ‘Ce livre, qui a été, on peut le dire, improvisé […] (This book, which – admittedly - has been improvised […])’, which obviously accounts for the imperfect composition. Wauters recognized this shortcoming, and he therefore made sure to include a manual on how to use Les tapisseries. This manual is comprised of three Indices (‘Artists’, ‘Artisans’ and ‘Iconographic Themes’) and a Table des matières which offers abstracts of the chapters. These tools reveal the richness of Les tapisseries bruxelloises. Numerous tapissiers, dyers, tapestry designers, and sets are discussed by Wauters who converted the fresh empirical data into a lively and concise picture of the history and the organization of the Brussels tapestry industry.

The key question, however, is whether Les tapisseries is a reliable source of information. Wauters published a number of documents in extenso, among them the first statutes of the tapestry corporation (1450) (pages 35-40) and the 1528 ordinance that obliged the Brussels tapissiers to use the famous “BB” mark (pages 144-149). As in these cases Wauters referred to the registers in his archives, tracing the original documents seems rather straightforward. The 1450 statutes, for example, can be read in the Registre alwaer geregistreert staen diversche ordonnantien raeckende verscheijden ambachte. In order to be able to check Wauters’s paleographic accuracy, however, the reference number of the register rather than its name is needed. Charles Pergameni’s Inventaire des archives et documents de la ville de Bruxelles (1943) is the current key to the names and the matching reference numbers, yet Pergameni renamed a number of registers originally listed by Wauters, including the Registre alwaer geregistreert staen diversche ordonnantien raeckende verscheijden ambachte. As a result, it may take some time to find out that the register is now known as Ordonnantien der ambachten ab anno 1365 tot 1501 (nr 1447).
It is obviously even more time-consuming to track down the documents that Wauters paraphrased and edited without providing references. Wauters presented, for example, a count of tapestry looms recorded ‘between 1703 and 1707’ (page 350); the document lists the last names and some Christian names of nine Brussels tapestry entrepreneurs and the number of looms they used. Given my research topic, I was extremely annoyed that Wauters, again, failed to give the reference to the document, and while at the outset I was hopeful of stumbling upon the document by accident, luck failed me. By studying Roger De Peuter’s monumental Brussel in de achttiende eeuw (1999), however, the reference finally emerged (File 721). I found that the document was actually dated 1705; that Wauters had arranged the entrepreneurs in alphabetical order; that Wauters had added the Christian names; and that Wauters had failed to mention that the officials who recorded the list explicitly warned of gaps in the count.

This kind of editorial freewheeling, however, is untypical of Wauters – in fact, the 1705 count is the exception that proves the rule. To be sure, Wauters edited and fragmented a substantial number of documents, yet he proved to be a very reliable source of information nonetheless. For example, he cut and pasted a load of biographical data from the Registers der Tresorije (Registers of the Treasury) (nos. 1293-1317) which include the applications for privileges filed by tapissiers, dyers and tapestry designers. While these data tend to discomfit tapestry scholars in their hunger for footnotes, as a licensed Wauters-watcher I dare say that about 90 per cent of the information provided by Wauters, either in full-text documents or in paraphrased and edited versions, is accurate. Wauters was a crack paleographer who must have spoken Flemish – a conditio sine qua non for studying documents on Brussels tapestry as about 95 per cent of the tapissiers spoke Flemish and 95 per cent of the archival material is therefore written in Flemish. True, Wauters published in French, yet this reveals the contemporary cultural dominance and aspirations of the French-speaking Belgians rather than historic reality; in fact, “Henri” Reydams and “Pierre” van de Hecke actually called each other “Hendrik” and “Peter”.

On the whole, then, Les tapisseries bruxelloises is not a problematic nineteenth-century relic. Wauters actually constructed a firm baseline: the data presented in Les tapisseries still helps tapestry scholars upwards, and Wauters’s study undoubtedly will remain a major compass point in any future socio-economic analysis of Brussels tapestry.

Alphonse Wauters, Les tapisseries bruxelloises. Essai historique sur les tapisseries et les tapissiers de haute et de basse-lice de Bruxelles, Brussels 1878 (reprint Brussels 1973).

For Wauters, see H. Pirenne, ‘Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Alphonse Wauters’, Annuaire de l’Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 67 (1901): 44-102 (with Wauters’s bibliography), and J.-M. Pardon, ‘L’archiviste-historien Alphonse Wauters et sa famille’, De middelaar tussen de genealogische navorsers/L’intermédiaire des généalogistes 117 (1965): 134-136.

Alphonse Wauters has to be distinguished from his younger nephew Alphonse-Jules Wauters (1845-1916), professor in art history at the Brussels Academy (1887-1916), who also published a number of studies on art history.

Please refer to this article as: Koenraad Brosens (2004), On Alphonse Wauters's Les tapisseries bruxelloises (1878), retrieved mm/dd/yyyy, from http://www.studiesinwesterntapestry.net

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