THE ANNUNCIATION, THE NATIVITY, AND THE ANNOUNCEMENT TO THE SHEPHERDS: _At the left in a Gothic chapel the Annunciation. The Virgin, in a richly jeweled and brocaded robe, reads the Holy Book. The angel in rich robes kneels before her. The lilies are in a dinanderie vase. Through the open door a bit of landscape is seen, and in a room beyond the chapel two women sit reading. The Nativity, at the right, is under a pent roof. The Virgin, Joseph, and Saint Elizabeth kneel in adoration about the Holy Babe, who lies on the flower-strewn grass. John kneels in front of his mother, and in the foreground an angel also worships. Above and beyond the stable the three shepherds sit tending their flocks, and an angel bearing the announcement inscribed on a scroll flutters down to them from Heaven. Oak-trees, rose-vines, and blossoming orange-trees in the grass._ [Illustration: _The Annunciation, The Nativity, and The Announcement to the Shepherds_ No. 3 ] [Illustration: _Scenes from the Roman de la Rose_ No. 4 ] This tapestry belongs to a small and very interesting group, all evidently the work of one designer. The three famous _Conversations Galantes_ (long erroneously called the _Baillée des Roses_) in the Metropolitan Museum are by the same man, as are the four panels of the _History of Lohengrin_ in Saint Catherine's Church, Cracow, the fifth fragmentary panel of the series being in the Musée Industrielle, Cracow. A fragment from the same designer showing a party of hunters is in the Church of Notre Dame de Saumur de Nantilly, and another fragment depicting a combat is in the Musée des Arts Decoratifs. Three small fragments--one with a single figure of a young man with a swan, like the Metropolitan pieces, on a striped ground, another showing a king reading in a portico very similar to the portico of the _Annunciation_, and the third showing a group of people centered about a king--were in the Heilbronner Collection. Schmitz points out[1] a connection between the three Metropolitan pieces and the series of seven pieces depicting the life of Saint Peter in the Beauvais Cathedral, with an eighth piece in the Cluny Musée, and it is quite evident that the cartoons are the work of the same man. But whereas the other pieces all have the same characteristics in the weaving, this series shows a somewhat different technique in such details as the outline and the hatchings, so that one must assume they were woven on another loom.