KHOROSSAN, NORTHEAST PERSIA, 17TH CENTURY

Seventeenth-century carpets from Khorassan are known for their extraordinary quality and beauty. Both the fine materials used in its creation-soft fleecy pile and beautifully dyed wool-and the skill demonstrated in the delicate drawing of the design make this carpet a superb example of its type. The palette is a subtle, harmonious combination of peach, light green, and blue wool, the field a complex arrangement of flowers, including unusual and dramatic flame-like cypress trees, tulips, weeping willows, and the 'shrubs' or floral sprays that often identify this type of carpet. One unusual feature is the central medallion discontinuous with the rest of the field design. In her article 'Khorasan Shrub Carpets' (Hali, vol. 125 pp. 77- 85), Christine Klose discusses the present carpet as the representative example of the 'shrub-tree' carpets in the shrub carpet group (subtype 1B). She identifies several distinctive features, including perfectly resolved borders, a distinctive pale orange field color, pointed trees, flowering stem and cypress border and a small central medallion.
Although showing signs of the wear of time, the carpet in its present state evokes much of its original beauty and exemplifies the faded grandeur of the Persian Empire.