LATE 17TH OR EARLY 18TH CENTURY

This rug, of venerable pedigree, defies easy categorisation. From a photograph it appears to be straightforward, a slightly provincial rendering of a 16th century village rug, but still retaining enough of the original spirit and colouring, and without a plethora of small motifs, and thus probably dateable to the seventeenth century. But the real surprise is that the warps are of white cotton which is never a normal feature of Anatolian vilage rugs of the 17th century. When he published the rug in 1922, Heinrich Jacoby described it as a South Caucasian Carpet and dated it to the 18th/19th century. He comments "were it not for the very early border design we would place it at a maximum of 50 years old". Every indication is that he was being unduly harsh on his own rug as most of the motifs are known in the 16th and 17th century.

The motif in the central medallion originated in early Ushak carpets; in his publication of this lot Professor Alexander reproduces an example from a 16th century Ushak carpet in the McMullen Collection. Like many motifs it had a long life and can be found in Konya rugs dating to the 17th/18th centuries (E Heinrich Kirchheim et al., Orient Stars, A Carpet Collection, Stuttgart and London, 1993, nos.133 and 134, pp.208-9). The border is a very ancient one, relating to that of lot 109 in the sale, but without the diagonals or the secondary floral motifs. One feature however that only comes in in the eighteenth century is the diagonal stems emerging from the border and terminating in leaves or floral motifs. These are found on a group of eighteenth century central Anatolian carpets such as a yellow ground example exhibited in Mannheim (Peter Bausback, Anatolische Knupfteppiche aus vier Jahrhunderten, Mannheim, 1978).