An Introduction to Tapestries

Many years ago I fell in love with tapestries, and that initiated a long road of learning and discovery, peppered with my share of mistakes along the way. Hopefully this simplified guide will help you distinguish between the different types of tapestries and allow you tofind exactly what youre looking for.
To be precise we should start from the very beginning, and that is the design. Before a tapestry is created a painter or draftsman creates the design in paint on canvas, fabric or paper; from the 1500s onward the two arts of painting and weaving were directly connected. The creation of a tapestry depended on the work of a team of individuals. Firstly a painter would create the design, he was called a "peintre cartonnier" (cartoon painter). The painter would first create a general impression, and then break up his drawing into fields, like drawing a cartoon, outlining figures and configuring a palate. This was done to simplify the weaving process. The second contributor to the creation of a tapestry was the dyer. The dyer would take raw wool and tint it, to approximate it as much as possible to the original artwork. And last, but definitely not least, there was the weaver who translated the design from painting into tapestry.A skilled weaver could make a tapestry nearly as fine as a painting.
We can break tapestries up into three major groups:
I. Handwoven
II. Mechanically Woven
III. Painted/Serigraphed

HANDWOVEN:
Aubusson Loom Used for Handweaving
The handwoven pieces are what what is generally called a"True Tapestry", that doesnt mean that all handwoven pieces are good, or even old, simply that they were done by hand. China has, in the past 20 years, begee a major hub of tapestry reproductions. Although some dealers try to pass Chinese pieces off as old, they are fairly easy to distinguish from older European pieces. Go straight to the foliage, or faces and you will find somewhat jagged and angular stitching, with an effect that looks like pixelation. European tapestries, even the lower quality pieces have a roundness to the designs, which is an extremelytime consuming process.
Modern Reproduction 1(notice jagged leafage)
Modern Reproduction 2 (notice 2 dimensional faces)
In the realm of the handwoven we have a variety of different types of tapestries. The main European production was in the Pays Flamand, a region which engepassed the north of France, Belgium and part of Holland. These tapestries are called Flemish. Flemish tapestries exist in every quality, from extremely fine, to rough; The designs also range from extremely detailed toalmost cartoonesque.(see pictures below). That doesnt necessarily mean a cartoonesque tapestry is lower quality than a detailed one, because like Naf art and Americana, there are collectors that focus specifically on these pieces and that means their prices can parallel the very fine detailed tapestries.
18th Century Flemish FineVerdure
18th Century French Cartoonesque Border
The Aubusson area of France became famous for its tapestries in the 16th and 17th centuries. They took the Flemish techniques and applied to them a very French sense of style and colors. Aubusson tapestries range from the Verdure (Greenery), practically indestinguishable from the Flemish verdure, to the extremely delicate pastel colored allegories based on paintings (called tapestry cartoons) by painters like Goya, Huet or Julliard.(see picture directly below)

18th Century Aubusson tapestry depicting one of de la Fontaines Fables
Dating Flemish