OTTOMAN TURKEY, CIRCA 1580

These tiles are of particular note because of the survival of the olive-brown colour used in the stems, which recalls the 'Damascus' style of the mid 16th century. A near identical tile panel, but formed of sixteen square tiles and with a palmette border, is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York gifted to them by J. Pierpoint Morgan in 1917 (Yanni Petsopoulos (ed.), Tulips, Arabesques and Turbans. Decorative Arts from the Ottoman Empire, London, 1982, no.128, p.134). Tiles with similar repeating patterns incorporating floral escutcheons decorate the Takyeci Ibrahim Aga Mosque in Istanbul, built in 1592, and the design continued to be popular in the early seventeenth century.