Lot Essay
Like the Safavids, the Mughal courts produced velvet carpets woven in coloured silks on a metal-thread ground. The borders were always woven separately and then later attached. The most impressive of all is probably that in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Stuart Cary Welch, India, exhibition catalogue, New York, 1985, no.136, p.207). The present border was almost certainly originally made for a small velvet floorspread similar, for example, to one in the Victoria and Albert Museum (Court Life and Arts under Mughal Rule, exhibition catalogue, London, 1982, no.223, p.88). Another section of the same border textile was sold in these Rooms, 6 October 2009, lot 247.