Carpet with a millefleur pattern

With a floral pattern and palette of red field and dark green border, this rug relates in a general way to various classical Persian and Indian carpet types that preceded it. However, its floral motifs are distinctive and combined in a special way. The piece falls into the middle or latter part of the range of millefleur Indian rugs of the second half of the seventeenth century to about 1800, in which the scale of motifs diminished over time. The clustering of blossoms into groups of three, five, or seven became increasingly formulaic, and the patterns reiterative and even stiff in appearance. In the present work, the palette and repetition of the pattern units are enlivened by the inclusion of pairs of dark blue leaves, alternately opened out and curled. These represent a variation on the classical pairing of palmettes or rosettes with flanking curved leaves. The pile material here and in 1975.1.2463 is probably pashmina wool, the undercoat of the Himalayan mountain goat. Reflecting the impoverishment in the materials and weave quality within its class, the foundation is not entirely silk, as cotton has been employed for the wefts. Accordingly, weave quality is low, with a count of 2,419 per square decimeter. Yet this is still an attractive and well-made work that recalls its luxury origins. One aspect of the seventeenth-century pashmina rugs has been retained: the use of silk warps of different colors organized in stripes, visible in the short fringe that survives at the ends of the piece. This technique was a hallmark of the older, grand carpets of the court. Related but somewhat earlier works of this type are held by the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum.(1)

Catalogue entry from Daniel Walker. The Robert Collection. Decorative Arts, Volume XV. Wolfram Koeppe, et al. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in association with Princeton University Press, 2012, pp. 382-384.

NOTE:
1. Metropolitan Museum, 14.40.714 and 44.70, probably from the same carpet (Dimand, Maurice Sven and Jean Mailey. Oriental Rugs in The Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York, 1973, p. 132, nos. 65, 66, pp. 126 – 27, figs. 141, 142).

Robert Lehman, New York