EARLY 18TH CENTURY

This is a most unusual rug. The border design of interlocking blocks of different colours linked with small trefoil knops and grid-like arrangements of squares, clearly draws its influences from early sixteenth century small-pattern Holbein carpets which had evolved from the white-on-red calligraphic kufesque designs of the earlier fifteenth century examples (Walter B. Denny, The Classic Tradition in Anatolian Carpets, London 2002, pl.6, p.63). The spiralling pattern of the minor stripes of the present rug is also a shared feature of the small-pattern Holbein group but can be found on earlier Seljuk carpets, as seen in a prayer carpet in the Christopher Alexander collection (C. Alexander, A Foreshadowing of 21st Century Art, Oxford 1993, pp.126-127) .

The two quatrefoil medallions in the field design of our rug are a continuation of the fifteenth and sixteenth century two-medallion Large pattern Holbein rugs an example of which is in the Vakiflar Museum, (Belkis Balpinar and Udo Hirsch, Vakiflar Museum Istanbul, Carpets, Wesel, 1988, no.17, pp.210-211, and another in the Turk ve Islam Museum (Hüulya Tezcan, Sumiyo Okumura and Kathleen Hamilton Gündogdu (eds.), Weaving Heritage of Anatolia, 2, Istanbul, 2007, no.16, p.38). The inclusion of the serrated hooked medallion in the centre of our rug is not typical of that group however and is more akin to the drawing and motifs employed in the transitional eighteenth century Dragon carpets of the Caucasus, (Şerare Yetkin, Early Caucasian Carpets in Turkey, Volume I, London 1978, pl.30). This unusual combination of motifs makes for an interesting design of which no exact comparable can be found.