Tapestry, Hotel Lallemant, Bourges, France
Wealthy couple, detail from the wool tapestry representing Spring, from the series Les Saisons de Lucas, after the artist who is thought to have drawn the original cartoons, Lucas van Leyden, Flemish, 17th century, in the Hotel Lallemant, a mansion built 1495-1518 in French Renaissance style by the Lallemant merchant family, in Bourges, Centre Val de Loire, France. The tapestry shows the agricultural pursuits of the peasants such as gardening and fishing with nets and the leisure pursuits of the nobility in Flanders in the 1530s. After being damaged in WWII, the tapestry was owned by the Nazi Hermann Goering, and was returned to France in 1947 on Liberation, and given to the Bourges museum in 1967. Since 1951 the building has housed the Musee des Arts Decoratifs and it was listed as a historic monument in 1840. Picture by Manuel Cohen
