WEST PERSIA, LATE 19TH CENTURY

The design of this wonderful Bijar carpet has a long ancestry. As is so often the case with carpet designs, it originates with the weavers of Kirman in the 17th century who designed a series of carpets with fields covered with interlocking arabesques enclosing floral sprays. Again in common with other Kirman designs, a close variant on this design began to be woven in north west Persia in the 18th century. By the 19th century it was so well associated with the north west that it was given the name Garrus, a small weaving centre near to Bijar, although it was not exclusively woven there. One of the best known carpets from this group, inscribed as being the work of Garrus and dated 1794, was formerly in the McMullan Collection, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (M. S. Dimand and Jean Mailey, Oriental Rugs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1973, fig.120, p.87). The rich colours and elegant design lent itself to the demands of the European interior particularly in the second half of the 19th century, and as a result many examples are found in country houses in Britain and western Europe.