"A plethora of garden elements compete for the viewer?s attention in this feature-filled garden; a balustraded terrace leads to a sunken parterre, lined with an obelisk, statuary, a Renaissance-style loggia and trelliswork arbours. An exedra spans the parterre in the distance. The inclusion of the figure of Hercules slaying the winged dragon at the centre of the fountain on the left may mean that reference was intended here to the mythical Garden of the Hesperides. Hercules was obliged to slay the dragon to gain access to the garden where the golden apples of the Hesperides grew. The Hercules fountain, the strangely two-dimensional scrolling box parterres, the two-tiered clipped topiary evergreens, and the wooded groves interspersed with palm trees, appear in other Flemish tapestries of this ?formal garden? type from the mid-seventeenth century onwards, and suggest a repertory of Baroque garden elements that were frequently reused in the creation of different tapestry sets. This example has been identified as a work from Lille, and the product of one of the offshoots of the Brussels tapestry manufactories that were established in the city in the late seventeenth century. The Lille workshops produced many tapestries based on the designs of David Teniers the Younger (1610?90); a tapestry which relates. However no link to Teniers can be established in the case of the figures in The Formal Garden. Text adapted from Painting Paradise: The Art of the Garden, London, 2015."
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