A tapestry can outlive its subject by centuries, and French novelist, memoirist and journalist, George Sand (1804 – 1876), knew this better than most. It was Sand who alerted a young Prosper Mérimée to a set of forgotten medieval weavings languishing in a chateau at Boussac, tapestries we now know as The Lady and the Unicorn, among the most celebrated textiles in the world. So there's a pleasing symmetry in the fact that 150 years after her death, Sand herself has become the subject of an ambitious new work from the town where her own pen name has its roots.
Hommage à George Sand, by French artist Françoise Pétrovitch, unfurls across 23 metres and stands 2.15 metres high, a tapestry conceived as ribbon rather than rectangle. Woven at the Manufacture Robert Four in Aubusson over more than two years, and taken off the loom in April 2026, it represents over 8,000 hours of collective labour by weavers Sarah Chassain, Clémence Tonnoir, Agathe Juillet and Frédérique Battu.
Françoise Pétrovitch with preparatory ink drawings for Hommage à George Sand
Pétrovitch works primarily in wash drawing, or lavis, building images through translucent layers of diluted ink. Translating that softness into thread became one of the project's central challenges. Dyer Nadia Petkovic developed a technique of dyeing several shades onto a single skein, letting the bleed and blur of a wash drawing emerge directly from the fibre itself, layered and controlled by the weaver rather than pre-mixed on a palette. Cartoon maker Delphine Mangeret worked alongside the artist to test how line and wash would survive the transition from paper to loom, producing woven samples until the calibration felt right for both flat colour fields and the finer marks.
For Pétrovitch, the brief was never to narrate a life in order. "What I want is to create flashes of life," she has said of the piece, describing a scenario built from "climaxes, accidents, obstacles" rather than a straight timeline. That refusal of chronology shapes the whole composition, which reads less like a biography and more like a current pulling the viewer along.
Details from the tapestry Hommage à George Sand by Françoise Pétrovitch
The imagery follows two threads through Sand's life: a line of water running the length of the piece, echoing the rivers of her beloved Berry, and a landscape built from recurring motifs, the Château de Nohant, tangled hair, reclining women, some dressed in leggings and tank tops, pulling Sand firmly into the present tense. Emmanuel Gérard, director of the Cité internationale de la tapisserie, has framed the piece as a departure for the medium itself, describing it as breaking with the tradition of the wall-hung tapestry in favour of something visitors can wander around and inhabit.
Rather than hang flat against a wall, George rests on a self-supporting, modular structure designed by Pétrovitch with Corégie Expo, curving the tapestry into new shapes for each venue it visits and exposing sections of its reverse, the side weavers usually keep hidden. Visitors can walk its length and circle behind it, discovering a second, unfinished-looking composition most tapestries never reveal.
It's a rare thing to watch a centuries-old craft flex to fit a subject as restless as Sand herself.
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Further Information:
Hommage à George Sand, presented by Les Mains d’Aubusson, is on view until 20 September 2026 at Cité internationale de la tapisserie Aubusson, France.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Detail from the tapestry Hommage à George Sand by Françoise Pétrovitch.
All further images as credited in captions.