POSSIBLY BY THEODORE TUDUC, EASTERN EUROPE, EARLY 20TH CENTURY

The field design of this rug appears to have been inspired by the ninth century, Byzantine textile known as the Mozac Hunter silk, in the Musée des Tissus in Lyon, MT 27386, published in Otto von Falke's seminal work, Decorative Silks, New York, 1922, plate VI. In our rug the double circular composition enclosing an equestrian subject, depicts King Bahram V robbing a lioness of her cub. Interestingly, the main border pattern is drawn from an entirely unrelated source: the Cloth of Saint Gereon, the oldest European tapestry in existence, dating to eleventh-century Cologne and separated from the Sassanian design of the field by a continent and four centuries.

The likely creator of this unusual hybrid is Theodore Tuduc (1888-1983), a Romanian carpet restorer who created forgeries of classical carpets in the first half of the Twentieth Century. At the time, many of his fakes were acquired by collectors and institutions as authentic. This carpet is not a documented example of Tuduc's work, but does fit into a known category of his production, in which he combined motifs from various sources to produce new designs. The even low pile and muted colour palette are distinctive characteristics frequently found in his work, as the carpets were apparently purposefully aged by rolling rounded river stones back and forth over the rug in a specially constructed mechanical box, (Ian Bennett, 'All that Glisters', HALI, issue 48, pp.96-98). For a fuller discussion on the work of Tuduc, please see Stefano Ionescu, Handbook of Fakes by Tuduc, Rome, 2010.