Regarded from the standpoint of design alone, the extraordinary co-ordination of color and pattern (not to speak of the depth and richness of the inner content) exhibited in certain of these pieces is a sharp challenge to the oft-repeated distinction drawn between the major and the minor arts, and one is constrained, after studying these tapestries, to conclude that there are no major or minor arts, only major and minor artists, and that greatness transfigures the material to the point of art, be it paint or potter's clay, and a simple Tanagra transcends in worth all the gilded and bejeweled banalities of Cellini, whose essentially flamboyant soul sought refuge in gold and precious stones. This truth, too rarely insisted upon, is of prime importance in any consideration of art, whether it be "fine" or applied art, and a collection such as this should do much to make it clear. Here one may observe how the principles of design and color that animate the immortal masterpieces of mural painting are identical with those that give life and vitality to these masterpieces of the loom, and thereby apprehend something of that mysterious law governing the operation of the creative impulse which finds its expression in all the arts, irrespective of time and place, whether it be in rugs, porcelains, Persian tiles and manuscripts, in European primitives, or in the works of Chinese and Japanese old masters, transcending racial differences and attaining a universal affinity that makes a Holbein one with a Chinese ancestral portrait. Surely such opulent fantasy of design and color as is revealed in Nos. 1, 3, 5, and 17, to mention only four of the Gothic pieces in the collection, is deserving of something better than the left-handed compliment of a comparison with painting.
In their masterly filling of the allotted space, in the fine subordination of the varied details to the general effect, as well as in the loftiness and intensity of the emotion expressed, these glorious products of the loom are worthy exemplars of the highest ideals of mural decoration no less than of the aristocratic art of tapestry-weaving. Reflections such as these are the natural consequence of a comparative study of art, and these and kindred reasons are the impelling causes prompting one to exhibit, not only tapestries, but rugs and textiles of all kinds, in an art museum and to give them the same serious study one would accord a Leonardo, a Giotto, a Rembrandt. Æsthetically and racially, they are no less revealing and frequently more interesting in that they are the products of the earliest expressions of those æsthetic impulses the manifestation of which has come to be called art; nor are they less authentic and expressive because communicated with the force and directness of the primitive loom, which give to all its products a certain character and worth rarely equaled by the more sophisticated products of the so-called fine arts.