The workshop occupies the ground floor of a stone building on a quiet street in Aubusson, in the Creuse valley of central France. The river, which once turned the dye mills, runs forty paces away behind a low wall.
Margaux Vincendeau, fifty-one, weaves at a horizontal low-warp loom built, the family record says, in 1781. The frame is oak. The beams are walnut. The treadles have been replaced four times. The harness, she replaces every fifteen years.
Aubusson has woven tapestries since the fourteenth century. At its height the town held forty workshops. Today it holds three, of which Vincendeau's is the smallest and the oldest by location.
She works from a cartoon, a full-size painted drawing slid beneath the warp threads so its lines are visible from above. The cartoon for her current piece, a commission from a private library in Bordeaux, was painted by a contemporary artist in Paris and shipped to her in a wooden tube.
The warp is undyed wool, set at six threads per centimetre. She sets the warp herself, a process that takes three days and requires a quiet shop. The threads are tensioned with stone weights hung from the back beam, in the manner used since before mechanical winches.
The weft is dyed wool from a mill in Felletin, three kilometres upriver, and silk for highlights from a supplier in Lyon. Her palette runs to about ninety colours at any time, hung on bobbins in a rack along the wall, sorted by hue and value.
She dyes some colours herself, in a copper cauldron in a back room, using madder, weld, indigo, and a discreet quantity of synthetic dyes for the brighter modern shades. The dye room smells of damp wool and, faintly, of the river.
“She dyes some colours herself, in a copper cauldron in a back room, using madder, weld, indigo, and a discreet quantity of synthetic dyes for the brighter modern shades.”
Weaving begins at the bottom of the cartoon and works upward. Vincendeau sits on a low bench facing the back of the loom. She sees the tapestry only in reverse during weaving. The right side faces the floor and is not viewed until the work is cut down.
She uses small bone bobbins called flûtes, each wound with a single colour. She passes them through the warp by hand, picking up and dropping threads with her fingers, building the image one weft pass at a time.
A skilled weaver in Aubusson produces about one square decimetre of finished tapestry per day. Vincendeau, on the current piece, is averaging slightly less because the cartoon has many small areas of transition between colours, which slow the work.
The current piece is two metres by three. She estimates eighteen months at the loom. She has been weaving for seven.
Her tools are minimal: the bobbins, a steel comb for beating down each weft pass, a small pair of scissors hung from a ribbon around her neck, and a magnifying lamp she lights only in the afternoon when the natural light from the window goes flat.
She works five days a week, seven hours a day. She does not work weekends. She does not work in August. Her grandmother, who taught her, kept the same schedule.
Mistakes are corrected by pulling out weft threads with a needle and reweaving. A correction of a single square centimetre takes about an hour. Vincendeau says she has reached the age at which she makes fewer mistakes and notices the ones she does make sooner.
Cartoons, once woven, are archived. Her family keeps a room upstairs filled with cartoons going back to 1809, rolled in linen and labelled with the client, the date, and the dimensions. The earliest, faded almost beyond legibility, was painted for a chateau near Limoges that no longer exists.
Her clients today are mostly institutions: museums, libraries, the occasional embassy, and a small number of private collectors. The wait for a new commission is four years.
She does not negotiate price. A square metre of her tapestry costs about thirty thousand euros, which reflects the materials, the cartoon licensing, and the months at the loom. She has not raised her rates since 2019.
Her apprentice, a young man named Émile, started two years ago. He weaves slowly, with concentration, and has not yet been allowed to work on any commissioned piece. He weaves sample squares from old cartoons, which Vincendeau examines in the evening and discusses with him the next morning.
The river outside continues. The bobbins wait in their rack, each a small column of colour. Above the loom, the cartoon shows a half-woven landscape that will hang, when finished, in a room neither weaver nor patron will outlive.
