Flemish Tapestry

Where is the dividing line between crafts and art? Indeed, does one exist? Readers of Tanya Harrod’s marvellous account of twentieth century crafts in the UK (RR, 99/275) will doubt it; and readers of this superb volume can only leave it knowing that such an artificial barrier cannot exist. It is not just that great contemporary artists designed pictures for the weavers (and a fair number of their cartoons are reproduced here alongside images of the resulting tapestries), but the sheer pictorial quality of the tapestries ranks them alongside contemporary paintings. From the late fifteenth to the end...