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Lot Essay
Structural Analysis
Warp: ivory cotton, Z8S, alternates depressed
Weft: buff cotton, Z3S x 3
Knots: asymmetric knot, open to the left, approx. 5V x 4H per cm sq.
Pile: knotted pile, sheep's wool
Sides: 2 warps, rebound red wool
Ends: each complete with short cotton warp fringes
This imposing carpet is an important example of the new flower style in Mughal India which became popular in architectural decoration and the decorative arts under the emperor Shah Jahan (r.1628-58). Inspired by painstaking observation of real plants as well as contemporary European engravings, by the mid-16th century such flowers had become a mainstay of Mughal decoration and design. The particular design of the lattice on this carpet, as well as the precise drawing, allows it to be securely dated to the middle of the seventeenth century, making it a contemporary of other icons of Mughal art such as the Taj Mahal, the Windsor Padshahnama and the Late Shah Jahan albums.
Floral Decoration
The flower as a decorative motif in Mughal art was the subject of an influential 1972 essay by Robert Skelton, in which he described a ‘flowering plant, naturally depicted, yet formally posed and arranged at distinct intervals against a plain background’ as ‘the Mughal decorative motif par excellence’ (Robert Skelton, ‘A decorative motif in Mughal Art’, in P. Pal, Aspects of Indian Art, Leiden, 1972, p.147). The year 1620 has been identified as the crucial moment when such flowers began to appear in Indian art. In the spring, Jahangir made a visit to Kashmir accompanied by his favoured court artist Mansur. In Jahangir’s autobiography he waxed lyrical about the beauties of the region: ‘in the soul-enchanting spring the hills and plains are filled with blossoms; the gate, the walls, the courts, the roofs, are lighted up by the torches of banquet-adorning tulips’ (Henry Beveridge and Alexander Rogers, The Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, or Memoirs of Jahangir, Lahore, 1974, vol.2, p.143). Jahangir ordered his artist Mansur to produce one hundred paintings of flowers, and so the Mughal flower style was supposedly born.
The development of the style, however, took shape over a much longer period. Jahangir provided the incentive for the new style but the visual model came from Europe, in the form of manuscripts or loose sheets of scientifically accurate representations of flowers known as herbals. These became very popular in Mughal court circles and workshops and were brought to India by clergymen and other European visitors. A generic connection can be seen in the formal poses of the plants, in the interest in naturalistic portrayal, in shading, and even in the provision of extra details such as butterflies or dragonflies fluttering nearby. This connection has been demonstrated very specifically by the discovery of a European herbal subject, dating from 1608 (first edition), and a Mughal copy, attributable to about 1635. The flower style, thus initiated in paintings under the emperor Jahangir in the later years of his rule, did not become the dominant court style until the reigns of Shah Jahan (r. 1627 – 1658) and his son Aurangzeb (r. 1658 – 1707). Susan Stronge also points out that there are studies of flowers by Mansur in the Gulshan Album which were probably painted before the legendary Kashmiri excursion, around the year 1612 (Susan Stronge, ‘The Minto Album and its decoration, c.1612-40’, in Elaine Wright, Muraqqa’, Alexandria, 2008, p.96). Whichever date is taken as the start point, by the 1620s botanically-accurate flowers had displaced the stylised flowers of the older Persian tradition as a central feature of Mughal art.
Though the origins seem to have been with painting and the arts of the book, soon such flowers quickly crossed into other media: the earliest pile textiles to depict flowers in this way are probably the small group of rugs featuring a single plant in a prayer arch, such as the example in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Madrid, executed around 1630 (Friedrich Spuhler, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Rugs and Carpets, London, 1988). The style developed over the subsequent two decades, first to include multiple flowers and plants, and then to include an overall lattice enclosing them. This lattice is not solely associated with carpets: a similar lattice appears around the flowers on six folios in the Late Shah Jahan Album, including a folio in the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington D.C. (S1986.93), two in the Art and History Collection, Washington D.C. (LTS2002.2.4 and LTS1995.2.8), and another from the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, which sold in these Rooms, 28 October 2025, lot 28 (for the full list see Elaine Wright, ‘The Late Shah Jahan Album, c.1650-58’, in Wright, op.cit., p.136). Roughly contemporary with those pages is a painting in the Windsor Padshahnama which depicts Shah Jahan receiving gifts from European ambassadors. In the painting, there is a red-ground carpet adorned with flowers divided by a cusped lattice (Royal Collection, RCIN 1005025.t, folio 116v), while more precisely drawn flowers appear in the background of the scene depicting Shah Jahan being weighed on his 42nd birthday in 1640 (RCIN 1005025.n, f.71r). Together, these indicate that the lattice began to appear on Mughal carpets around the middle of the century.
Architecture
Particularly relevant when considering the evolution of carpet design in Mughal India is architectural decoration, since often carpets were designed to complement their settings. Floral lattice carpets find some of their most obvious architectural counterparts in the white marble and red sandstone buildings of the Taj Mahal in Agra, which were begun on the orders of Shah Jahan in 1631, (Catherine Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge, 2008, p.182). The sandstone walls and ceilings of the mosque in the complex for instance, are decorated with ivory lattices formed of interlaced flowering vine that are visually striking set against the deep red ground. The dadoes feature carved flowering plants, depicted with the botanical realism one expects of Mughal artists in this period. Similar carved white marble dadoes can be seen on the walls of the private audience hall (Doulat Khana-i khassi) at the Agra Fort which were originally built by Emperor Akbar but were renovated by his grandson, Shah Jahan in AH 1046⁄1636-7 AD (Asher, op.cit., p.185). Daniel Walker discusses a similar combination of lattice ceilings and floral dadoes in the Red Fort, Delhi, renovated between 1639 and 1648 (Walker, op.cit., pp.88-9).
Lattices
The particular arrangement of flowers and the shape of the enclosing lattice varies significantly between members of this group. In his catalogue of the exhibition of Indian carpets held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Daniel Walker divides carpets with lattices into two groups: those upon which the lattice enclosed individually-depicted flowering plants; and those upon which blossoms and vines were interwoven with the lattice (Daniel Walker, Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era, New York, 1997, pp.107-13). Our carpet belongs to the former category, and indeed it is remarkable for the great variety of flowers depicted in the field. Thanks to the accuracy of the drawing, it is possible to distinguish approximately ten different flowers, including tulips, lilies, carnations, roses and plum-blossom. They are arranged somewhat unpredictably across the carpet as in a field of wildflowers. Wright suggests of the Late Shah Jahan album that on the later folios the number of flower varieties depicted in the margins becomes more limited (Elaine Wright, ‘The Late Shah Jahan Album, c.1650-58’, in Wright, op.cit., p.115). If the same rule can be applied for carpets, then that would suggest this to be an example of particularly fine quality. Similar drawing can be seen in the flowers in the shaped pashmina carpets, such as those in the Cincinnati Arts Museum, Ohio (1952.201) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (66.228). The dark yellow lilies in the upper row of our carpet, which droop over as the petals peeling back to reveal the stamens, are similar to the larger-scale examples on a carpet in a Belgian private collection (published Walker, op.cit., cat.no.23, fig.95). Walker dates all three of those examples to circa 1650, further securing our attribution of this carpet to the mid-17th century. The large scale of the flowers distinguishes these rugs from the so-called ‘Millefleurs’ carpets, which are attributed to the late 17th and early 18th century.
On our example, the golden-yellow lattice comprises an interlocking grid of eight-pointed stars and cruciform units, with flowerheads at each vertex and flowering stems centered in each one. This contrasts, for instance, with the sinuous ‘S’ shaped vines running along a fragmentary Pashmina carpet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (acc.no.T.403-1910), or the rhombus-shaped cells on a carpet in the City Palace Museum, Jaipur (published E Gans-Rudein, Indian Carpets, London, 1984, p.98). More similar to the present lot is the lattice of the Pashmina carpet in the Calouste Gulbenkian museum, attributed to approximately 1650, upon which is a repeat design of interlocking elongated lozenges (T60). Similar elongated cruciform motifs can be glimpsed on a fragment in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (T 85-5 / 1926), while a more squat version appears on a carpet in the al-Sabah collection in Kuwait (LNS 43 R), a long rug in the collection of the Maharaja of Jaipur, and on a fragment in the Textile Museum, Washington D.C. (R51.1.7). A lattice of lozenge formation can be seen on a fragment of a Mughal 'Flower and Lattice' carpet in the following lot in the present sale.
The closest known comparable to the present carpet is in the Textile Museum, Washington D.C. (R63.00.4). The drawing of the flowers is almost identical, and the lattice comprises the same combination of stars and crosses. Moreover, both the main border and the ivory minor stripes to the sides are very similar. Both carpets also have the same feature where the orientation of the flowers intermittently ‘flips’ along the length of the carpet. At almost six metres long, however, ours is significantly larger than the Washington carpet.
Provenance
The former owner of this carpet, Irma Nathan, married the American businessman and diplomat, Jesse Isidor Straus, in 1895. After the death of the latter's father on board the Titanic in 1912, he became the co-owner of Macy's department store. A staunch ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was appointed chair of the New York State Temporary Emergency Relief Administration during the Great Depression, and then became the American ambassador to France between 1933 and 1936, shortly before his death. Irma Nathan Straus lived until 1970, and donated parts of her collection to several American museums: she gave eight paintings, including a Madonna and Child by Berlingherio, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1958 and 1964. A colourful character, according to her 1970 obituary, she was 'an expert narcissus cultivator' who 'often gathered top honors at the annual narcissus show of the Westbury Horticultural Society' (New York Times, 6 April 1970). Perhaps it was this passion for flowers that drew her to this remarkable carpet.
Mughal Lattice carpets remain highly prized among collectors and institutions, even when they only survive as fragments. Complete examples such as this are particularly rare, and seldom appear on the market. Many of those which have, such as the lattice carpet which sold in these Rooms, 24 April 1997, lot 425, have been sold directly to prestigious institutions: in that case, the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. A carpet with a lattice of star-shaped motifs enclosing radiating floral medallions, which formerly belonged to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, sold in these Rooms, 8 October 2013, lot 50. More recently, a fragmentary Pashmina carpet with a large-scale lattice design sold in these Rooms, 27 October 2022, lot 200. These last two remain among the most valuable carpets ever sold at auction.
Warp: ivory cotton, Z8S, alternates depressed
Weft: buff cotton, Z3S x 3
Knots: asymmetric knot, open to the left, approx. 5V x 4H per cm sq.
Pile: knotted pile, sheep's wool
Sides: 2 warps, rebound red wool
Ends: each complete with short cotton warp fringes
This imposing carpet is an important example of the new flower style in Mughal India which became popular in architectural decoration and the decorative arts under the emperor Shah Jahan (r.1628-58). Inspired by painstaking observation of real plants as well as contemporary European engravings, by the mid-16th century such flowers had become a mainstay of Mughal decoration and design. The particular design of the lattice on this carpet, as well as the precise drawing, allows it to be securely dated to the middle of the seventeenth century, making it a contemporary of other icons of Mughal art such as the Taj Mahal, the Windsor Padshahnama and the Late Shah Jahan albums.
Floral Decoration
The flower as a decorative motif in Mughal art was the subject of an influential 1972 essay by Robert Skelton, in which he described a ‘flowering plant, naturally depicted, yet formally posed and arranged at distinct intervals against a plain background’ as ‘the Mughal decorative motif par excellence’ (Robert Skelton, ‘A decorative motif in Mughal Art’, in P. Pal, Aspects of Indian Art, Leiden, 1972, p.147). The year 1620 has been identified as the crucial moment when such flowers began to appear in Indian art. In the spring, Jahangir made a visit to Kashmir accompanied by his favoured court artist Mansur. In Jahangir’s autobiography he waxed lyrical about the beauties of the region: ‘in the soul-enchanting spring the hills and plains are filled with blossoms; the gate, the walls, the courts, the roofs, are lighted up by the torches of banquet-adorning tulips’ (Henry Beveridge and Alexander Rogers, The Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, or Memoirs of Jahangir, Lahore, 1974, vol.2, p.143). Jahangir ordered his artist Mansur to produce one hundred paintings of flowers, and so the Mughal flower style was supposedly born.
The development of the style, however, took shape over a much longer period. Jahangir provided the incentive for the new style but the visual model came from Europe, in the form of manuscripts or loose sheets of scientifically accurate representations of flowers known as herbals. These became very popular in Mughal court circles and workshops and were brought to India by clergymen and other European visitors. A generic connection can be seen in the formal poses of the plants, in the interest in naturalistic portrayal, in shading, and even in the provision of extra details such as butterflies or dragonflies fluttering nearby. This connection has been demonstrated very specifically by the discovery of a European herbal subject, dating from 1608 (first edition), and a Mughal copy, attributable to about 1635. The flower style, thus initiated in paintings under the emperor Jahangir in the later years of his rule, did not become the dominant court style until the reigns of Shah Jahan (r. 1627 – 1658) and his son Aurangzeb (r. 1658 – 1707). Susan Stronge also points out that there are studies of flowers by Mansur in the Gulshan Album which were probably painted before the legendary Kashmiri excursion, around the year 1612 (Susan Stronge, ‘The Minto Album and its decoration, c.1612-40’, in Elaine Wright, Muraqqa’, Alexandria, 2008, p.96). Whichever date is taken as the start point, by the 1620s botanically-accurate flowers had displaced the stylised flowers of the older Persian tradition as a central feature of Mughal art.
Though the origins seem to have been with painting and the arts of the book, soon such flowers quickly crossed into other media: the earliest pile textiles to depict flowers in this way are probably the small group of rugs featuring a single plant in a prayer arch, such as the example in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Madrid, executed around 1630 (Friedrich Spuhler, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Rugs and Carpets, London, 1988). The style developed over the subsequent two decades, first to include multiple flowers and plants, and then to include an overall lattice enclosing them. This lattice is not solely associated with carpets: a similar lattice appears around the flowers on six folios in the Late Shah Jahan Album, including a folio in the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington D.C. (S1986.93), two in the Art and History Collection, Washington D.C. (LTS2002.2.4 and LTS1995.2.8), and another from the collection of Prince and Princess Sadruddin Aga Khan, which sold in these Rooms, 28 October 2025, lot 28 (for the full list see Elaine Wright, ‘The Late Shah Jahan Album, c.1650-58’, in Wright, op.cit., p.136). Roughly contemporary with those pages is a painting in the Windsor Padshahnama which depicts Shah Jahan receiving gifts from European ambassadors. In the painting, there is a red-ground carpet adorned with flowers divided by a cusped lattice (Royal Collection, RCIN 1005025.t, folio 116v), while more precisely drawn flowers appear in the background of the scene depicting Shah Jahan being weighed on his 42nd birthday in 1640 (RCIN 1005025.n, f.71r). Together, these indicate that the lattice began to appear on Mughal carpets around the middle of the century.
Architecture
Particularly relevant when considering the evolution of carpet design in Mughal India is architectural decoration, since often carpets were designed to complement their settings. Floral lattice carpets find some of their most obvious architectural counterparts in the white marble and red sandstone buildings of the Taj Mahal in Agra, which were begun on the orders of Shah Jahan in 1631, (Catherine Asher, The Architecture of Mughal India, Cambridge, 2008, p.182). The sandstone walls and ceilings of the mosque in the complex for instance, are decorated with ivory lattices formed of interlaced flowering vine that are visually striking set against the deep red ground. The dadoes feature carved flowering plants, depicted with the botanical realism one expects of Mughal artists in this period. Similar carved white marble dadoes can be seen on the walls of the private audience hall (Doulat Khana-i khassi) at the Agra Fort which were originally built by Emperor Akbar but were renovated by his grandson, Shah Jahan in AH 1046⁄1636-7 AD (Asher, op.cit., p.185). Daniel Walker discusses a similar combination of lattice ceilings and floral dadoes in the Red Fort, Delhi, renovated between 1639 and 1648 (Walker, op.cit., pp.88-9).
Lattices
The particular arrangement of flowers and the shape of the enclosing lattice varies significantly between members of this group. In his catalogue of the exhibition of Indian carpets held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Daniel Walker divides carpets with lattices into two groups: those upon which the lattice enclosed individually-depicted flowering plants; and those upon which blossoms and vines were interwoven with the lattice (Daniel Walker, Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era, New York, 1997, pp.107-13). Our carpet belongs to the former category, and indeed it is remarkable for the great variety of flowers depicted in the field. Thanks to the accuracy of the drawing, it is possible to distinguish approximately ten different flowers, including tulips, lilies, carnations, roses and plum-blossom. They are arranged somewhat unpredictably across the carpet as in a field of wildflowers. Wright suggests of the Late Shah Jahan album that on the later folios the number of flower varieties depicted in the margins becomes more limited (Elaine Wright, ‘The Late Shah Jahan Album, c.1650-58’, in Wright, op.cit., p.115). If the same rule can be applied for carpets, then that would suggest this to be an example of particularly fine quality. Similar drawing can be seen in the flowers in the shaped pashmina carpets, such as those in the Cincinnati Arts Museum, Ohio (1952.201) and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (66.228). The dark yellow lilies in the upper row of our carpet, which droop over as the petals peeling back to reveal the stamens, are similar to the larger-scale examples on a carpet in a Belgian private collection (published Walker, op.cit., cat.no.23, fig.95). Walker dates all three of those examples to circa 1650, further securing our attribution of this carpet to the mid-17th century. The large scale of the flowers distinguishes these rugs from the so-called ‘Millefleurs’ carpets, which are attributed to the late 17th and early 18th century.
On our example, the golden-yellow lattice comprises an interlocking grid of eight-pointed stars and cruciform units, with flowerheads at each vertex and flowering stems centered in each one. This contrasts, for instance, with the sinuous ‘S’ shaped vines running along a fragmentary Pashmina carpet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (acc.no.T.403-1910), or the rhombus-shaped cells on a carpet in the City Palace Museum, Jaipur (published E Gans-Rudein, Indian Carpets, London, 1984, p.98). More similar to the present lot is the lattice of the Pashmina carpet in the Calouste Gulbenkian museum, attributed to approximately 1650, upon which is a repeat design of interlocking elongated lozenges (T60). Similar elongated cruciform motifs can be glimpsed on a fragment in the Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna (T 85-5 / 1926), while a more squat version appears on a carpet in the al-Sabah collection in Kuwait (LNS 43 R), a long rug in the collection of the Maharaja of Jaipur, and on a fragment in the Textile Museum, Washington D.C. (R51.1.7). A lattice of lozenge formation can be seen on a fragment of a Mughal 'Flower and Lattice' carpet in the following lot in the present sale.
The closest known comparable to the present carpet is in the Textile Museum, Washington D.C. (R63.00.4). The drawing of the flowers is almost identical, and the lattice comprises the same combination of stars and crosses. Moreover, both the main border and the ivory minor stripes to the sides are very similar. Both carpets also have the same feature where the orientation of the flowers intermittently ‘flips’ along the length of the carpet. At almost six metres long, however, ours is significantly larger than the Washington carpet.
Provenance
The former owner of this carpet, Irma Nathan, married the American businessman and diplomat, Jesse Isidor Straus, in 1895. After the death of the latter's father on board the Titanic in 1912, he became the co-owner of Macy's department store. A staunch ally of Franklin D. Roosevelt, he was appointed chair of the New York State Temporary Emergency Relief Administration during the Great Depression, and then became the American ambassador to France between 1933 and 1936, shortly before his death. Irma Nathan Straus lived until 1970, and donated parts of her collection to several American museums: she gave eight paintings, including a Madonna and Child by Berlingherio, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art between 1958 and 1964. A colourful character, according to her 1970 obituary, she was 'an expert narcissus cultivator' who 'often gathered top honors at the annual narcissus show of the Westbury Horticultural Society' (New York Times, 6 April 1970). Perhaps it was this passion for flowers that drew her to this remarkable carpet.
Mughal Lattice carpets remain highly prized among collectors and institutions, even when they only survive as fragments. Complete examples such as this are particularly rare, and seldom appear on the market. Many of those which have, such as the lattice carpet which sold in these Rooms, 24 April 1997, lot 425, have been sold directly to prestigious institutions: in that case, the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. A carpet with a lattice of star-shaped motifs enclosing radiating floral medallions, which formerly belonged to Cornelius Vanderbilt II, sold in these Rooms, 8 October 2013, lot 50. More recently, a fragmentary Pashmina carpet with a large-scale lattice design sold in these Rooms, 27 October 2022, lot 200. These last two remain among the most valuable carpets ever sold at auction.