The first secure description comes late.
In 1680, an inventory made after the death of François VI de La Rochefoucauld recorded seven tapestries representing the hunt of the unicorn in his Paris house. The works themselves had been woven almost two centuries earlier, around 1495 to 1505, probably from designs made in France and executed in the Southern Netherlands. Who commissioned them remains uncertain.
This gap between creation and documentation is part of their fascination.
“A tapestry can be a masterpiece in one generation and insulation in another.”
The tapestries are richly specific. Hunters move through woods filled with plants and animals. Dogs pursue the unicorn. Noble figures appear. Mysterious initials recur through the series. Yet the person who paid for this extraordinary undertaking has escaped the record.
The objects survived more successfully than the explanation.
By 1728 the tapestries were at the La Rochefoucauld château at Verteuil in western France. Some were already described as worn. Others had been placed in storage. This was not museum life. They were furnishings in a great house, magnificent perhaps, but still subject to the ordinary dangers of fabric, damp, changing taste and family use.
Then came the French Revolution.
In 1793 the tapestries were taken from the château. Later accounts describe them being used by local people for purposes so ordinary that they sound invented. Parts were said to have covered potatoes or vegetables in barns against the cold. The story survives because it captures a particular humiliation of luxury. An object that had required enormous skill, expensive materials and aristocratic patronage could become useful cloth when the social order around it disappeared.
It is tempting to treat this as a story about ignorance.
That is too easy.
Objects do not possess permanent importance by themselves. Importance has to be recognized, recorded and sometimes reconstructed. A tapestry can be a masterpiece in one generation and insulation in another. Both judgments emerge from circumstances around it.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, the tapestries were found again in damaged condition, restored and returned to Verteuil. The fragments of one scene had suffered particularly badly. According to later Met research, portions that survived were at one point used to block draughts in walls.
Their next great movement was quieter.
In 1922 six of the large tapestries travelled to New York for exhibition. John D. Rockefeller Jr. saw them there and bought them. He later recalled that he had lingered only briefly before deciding. They entered his private residence, where a room was created for them and where they became among his most valued possessions.
A private collector had rescued them from one form of uncertainty.
He then made the decision that changed their future again.
Rockefeller had become deeply involved in the creation of The Cloisters, the branch of The Metropolitan Museum of Art devoted to medieval Europe. In 1937 he gave the six major Unicorn Tapestries to the museum. Fragments of the remaining tapestry were acquired separately soon afterwards and reunited with the group.
The movement from Verteuil to Rockefeller’s house and then to The Cloisters is easy to tell as a march toward the correct destination.
Provenance is rarely so tidy.
The tapestries were made for a private patron. They survived for centuries because private families kept them. They also suffered because houses are vulnerable to war, revolution, neglect and ordinary reuse. A private collector purchased them and loved them enough to construct a room around them. A public institution then acquired the resources and obligation to conserve them for people who would never have entered Rockefeller’s home.
Each stage changed their meaning.
At Verteuil they were inherited furnishings.
In the barn they were material.
In Rockefeller’s house they were privately possessed masterpieces.
At The Cloisters they became part of a public account of medieval Europe.
The textiles themselves carry evidence of these changes. Damage is not separate from their history. Missing sections, restored areas and recovered fragments record moments when the tapestries were valued differently.
This is why provenance becomes more interesting when it stops behaving like a pedigree.
It is useful to know that an object passed from one distinguished owner to another. But the real history often lies in the moments when the chain nearly broke.
The Unicorn Tapestries survived a revolution.
They survived changes in houses, uses and owners.
They survived being mistaken for something much less important than they were.
Perhaps the strangest part is that their original owner remains unknown.
We know something about almost everyone who saved them.
We still do not know who first ordered them made.