Tapestry

A tapestry (Ukrainian shpalera or hobelen) is a work of artistic weaving: a pile-free wall hanging with a narrative, landscape or ornamental design, made by hand. The technique differs from ordinary cloth-weaving in that the coloured weft does not travel across the full width of the fabric but works only within its own area of colour, completely covering the warp threads. The weaver follows a cartoon, a full-scale painted design. Tapestry is woven on a vertical (high-warp) or horizontal (low-warp) loom.

On the words. Hobelen comes from the name of the Paris royal manufactory founded in 1662 on the site of the Gobelin family’s workshop; in Ukrainian usage the word covers all similar works, including modern artists’ pieces. Shpalera is the older general name for such woven pictures; the academic dictionary defines it as a pile-free wall carpet or upholstery fabric with a narrative or landscape image, made by hand. In early modern Ukraine such pieces were also called opony, kobertsi and tapetii. Ukrainian encyclopaedias place tapestry within carpet-making and describe it as a “carpet-picture”.

Textiles in tapestry weave are known from antiquity and Coptic Egypt; in Europe tapestry production is recorded from the twelfth century and flourished in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Flanders, France). In Ukraine tapestries were woven in magnates’ and landowners’ manufactories in the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. A revival began in the 1920s and 1930s, and from the late 1950s the art was renewed by graduates of the Lviv school — Ivan and Mariia Lytovchenko and others; later Mykhailo Bilas and Liudmyla Zhohol worked in the field.