The Prince’s Journey

This panel is from of a set known as La première tenture chinoise or Histoire du Roi de la Chine. It consists of six tapestries: The Prince holds an Audience: The Prince’s Journey; The Astronomers; The Repast; Collecting Pineapples; and Tea picking. Based on cartoons by Vernansal, Blin de Fontenay and Monnoyer, it was one of the most popular of the series woven at the Beauvais manufactory and multiple sets were produced from the late 17th century onwards. It reaffirmed the taste for the Chinese style in France that had been established with the construction of the Porcelain Trianon at Versailles in 1670 and which would prevail throughout the 18th century. This aesthetic trend combined iconographic accuracy with a taste for a literary vision of China of a novelesque exoticism.

Some of the figures that appear in this series are based on real, historical individuals. The prince is the Emperor Kangxi, depicted in a pose that is taken from the frontispiece of Descriptio Legationis Batavicae by Johan Nieuhof (Amsterdam 1668), while his portrait is derived from the one published by the Jesuit Father Athanasius Kircher in China Monumentis (Amsterdam, 1667), which is also the source for the astronomer who descends the pagoda staircase. The latter figure is, in fact, the Jesuit Father Schall, who also appears in the panel entitled The Astronomers, of which the left-hand side is similar to another tapestry in the Colección Santander. In the case of The Prince’s Journey this composition normally terminates on the left with the branches seen here next to the palanquin, while on the right it generally terminates half-way through the dapple-grey horse’s croup. In examples of that type, however, the composition is vertical in format whereas the present example is horizontal, indicating that it was woven for a specific location. The border on this example seems to correspond to a set woven around 1700.