SOUTH EAST PERSIA, CIRCA 1880

The present lot is as lively and playful as it is unusual; the vast majority of pictorial carpets woven in Persia tend to portray mythical, poetic or Royal scenes, so the depiction of ordinary people going about their day-to-day lives is much less common. This carpet presents a charming and enlightening snapshot of an armed man in his Phrygian bonnet who appears to be confronting a farmer with a pair of exotically decorated turkeys in the foreground. Above them a figure ushers his camel train across what could be the Si-o-seh pol bridge in Isfahan which is renowned for its series of vaulted brickwork arches. Around the border, interspersed with large-scale flowerheads, is a more familiar scene from the Shahnameh, showing Rostam defeating Div-e Sepid or the 'White Demon'. A related example that shares a similar field arrangement, although with a more rigid drawing and smaller scale border, was offered in these Rooms, Bernard Blondeel & Armand Deroyan: Important Tapestries and Carpets, 2 April 2003, lot 58. Pictorial Kirman carpets are more commonly woven in rug format or, at most, small carpet size. At over 12ft. in width our carpet was intended to be on a grand scale and having been reduced in length, presumably to the specifications of the room in which it was formerly housed, this carpet could conceivably have measured at least a third longer.