Esther Bell: "Coypel: Staging Don Quixote"

Born into one of the most powerful dynasties of working artists, Charles Coypel occupied a unique place between the worlds of painting and performance in eighteenth-century France. Bell explores Coypel’s longest running commission, a series of Gobelins tapestries based on Cervantes’s Don Quixote. The project—the focus of the special exhibition Coypel's Don Quixote Tapestries: Illustrating a Spanish Novel in Eighteenth-Century France (February 25–May 17, 2015)—not only celebrated the novel but also several contemporary stage adaptations, including two by Coypel himself.