WEST ANATOLIA, 16TH CENTURY

Among all the rugs and carpets produced in Ushak during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, a very small number have overall floral field designs. Of these, the majority repeat a design of one sort or another which is normally found as a border, but is in these cases used to form vertical bands (Joseph V.McMullen, Islamic Carpets, New York, 1965, no.79, pp.254-5, among others). To have the field filled with a genuine overall repeat pattern is very unusual indeed. One example, formerly in a private Berlin collection, the blue field filled with overall stylised palmettes of a somewhat more blousy floral character than the present examples, was published in Kurt Erdmann, Oriental Carpets, London, 1962, pl.146.