KIRMAN, SOUTH EAST PERSIA, SECOND HALF 17TH CENTURY

This rug, whose weaving technique places it amongst the so-called 'Vase' carpet group, is part of a rarer subgroup which bear a single-plane design of overall shrubs or trees. All of those dating from the first half of the century, which tend to be better spaced and have more complex borders, have only survived as fragments apart from the beautiful early 17th-century ‘Lady Dudley shrub lattice' carpet. Formerly in the collection of Prince Stanislaw Radziwill and then with Grace, Countess of Dudley, later sold in Sotheby's London, 11 October 1990, lot 706, that carpet is the sole known surviving complete shrub-lattice carpet of the Kirman 'vase'-technique, that remains in very good condition and is of undoubted art historical significance within the corpus of surviving Safavid rugs. Later developments of the design appeared to have been woven in smaller formats, most of which have survived intact, as seen in an example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (C.G Ellis, Oriental Carpets, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1993, fig. 57b, p.204) another in the Newark Museum (Ellis, op.cit. fig 57a, p.203) and one sold as part of the Yves Mikaeloff collection, Christie's London, 16 October 1997, lot 75.

The border design of green cypress-like trees, each enclosed by a bracket of floral sprays is found on a small number of 'vase' carpets, both with field designs with the more common three-plane lattice field (Benguiat sale, American Art Association, New York, 19-22 November 1922, lot 735; Christine Klose, 'Betrachtungen zu nordwestpersischen Gartenteppichen des 18. Jahrhunderts' HALI, volume 1, no. 2, Summer 1978, pl. 8, p. 118) and those with single plane designs (May Beattie, Carpets of Central Persia with special reference to Rugs of Kirman, Sheffield and Birmingham exhibition catalogue, Westerham, 1976, no. 56, pp. 80-81; and Christie's London, 15 October 1998, lot 317). Its form, as May Beattie points out, derives from an abstraction of an early 'vase' carpet field design element (Beattie, op.cit., no.14, p.49). A near identical border fragment is published together with a number of other Safavid south Persian carpet borders in F.R.Martin, A History of Oriental Carpets Before 1800, Vienna, 1908, pl.XX. This same border can also be seen later on a small group of south Persian weavings which use a different technique but take their field and border designs from 'vase' carpets (Werner Grote-Hasenbalg, Der Orientteppich, seine Geschichte und seine Kultur, Berlin, 1922, vol. III, pl. 62; also one sold in these Rooms 21 October 1993, lot 519).