Also was it a feather in his cap that at the time when the Gobelins factory was sighing and dying for lack of funds, the provincial factory of Beauvais not only remained prosperous, but opened its doors to many of the starving operatives from the Gobelins ateliers, thus saving them from the horrid fate of joining the Dragonades, as some of their fellows had done.
But the followers of the able Béhagle had not his capability. After his twenty years of prosperity the factory languished under the direction of his widow and sons, and that of the brothers Filleul, and Micou, up to the time when the Regent Philip was fumbling the reigns of government, and when everything but scepticism and Les Precieuses was sinking into feeble disintegration. The factory became a financial failure from which the regent had not power to lift it.
Again we see the name of the son of Madame de Montespan, the Duke d'Antin, who was at this time director of buildings for the crown and in this capacity had the power of choosing the directors of both the Gobelins and Beauvais. The place of director at Beauvais was empty; d'Antin must have the credit of filling it wisely with the painter Jean-Baptiste Oudry. He was a man endowed with the sort of energy we are apt to consider modern and American. He already occupied a high place in the Gobelins, and retained it, too, while he lifted Beauvais from the Slough of Despond, and carried it to its most brilliant flowering.
[Illustration: BEAUVAIS TAPESTRY. EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
[Illustration: BEAUVAIS TAPESTRY. TIME OF LOUIS XVI
Collection of Wm. Baumgarten, Esq., New York]
It is only as the history of a factory touches us that we are interested in its changes. The result of Oudry's direction is one that we see so frequently in a small way that it is agreeable to recognise its cause. Oudry was pre-eminently a painter of animals. Add to this the tendency to draw cartoons in suites and the demand for furniture coverings, and at once we have the _raison d'être_ of the design seen over and over again nowadays on old tapestried chairs, the designs picturing the _Fables of La Fontaine_. These were the especial work of Oudry who composed them, who put into them his best work as animal painter, and who set them on the looms of Beauvais many times.
