Tapestry - The Ladies

Found in Avignon, this early 20th-century tapestry holds a whole afternoon inside it, a company of finely dressed figures gathering flowers at the edge of a wood. It is woven on a grand scale and mounted on a wooden frame, the whole scene worked in soft browns and greens. Scenes like this descend from the 18th-century French painters of the fête galante, Watteau and Boucher and their followers, who filled parkland with well-dressed company at leisure, a subject woven into tapestries long after the paintings were made. Sylvie hangs it across a large bare wall, where it fills the room like a window thrown open onto the trees.