How A. Cecil Edwards Wrote The Book On Persian Carpets

LONDON, April 15, 20102 -- Books on oriental carpets are still a relatively new phenomenon, with the oldest dating back only to around 1900.

But if there is one book that is the most interesting of all, it may be "The Persian Carpet" by A. Cecil Edwards.

Part of the reason is that the book, published in 1953, is a comprehensive guide to the Persian carpet industry of the early 1900s, the period during which many of the Persian carpets in Western households today were made.

But the other reason the book is so interesting is the author himself.

Edwards was intimately familiar with his subject because, from the years 1900 to 1947, he was a leading figure in the rug business and spent much time in Iran.

Below is a picture of the book's cover.

And at the top of this page is a photo of the kind of Persian carpet Edwards particularly admired: a carpet from Kashan. It is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Edwards belongs to that bygone generation of British professionals who sought their fortunes in the East at the turn-of-the-last century through a combination of luck and daring.

His story begins in Istanbul, where his great uncle, George Baker, was the official gardener for the Turkish sultan and his uncle, James Baker, was a co-founder of Oriental Carpet Manufacturers, or OCM.

At the time, OCM was already one of the world's most successful international carpet companies. When it was founded in Smyrna (now Izmir) in 1908 as a merger of six major carpet manufacturing firms, it had a start-up capitalization of £400,000 - a massive sum for that day.

Young Cecil Edwards joined OCM as it bought and manufactured carpets in Turkey and Persia and exported them to the British market. He soon found himself focusing on Persia, moving to Hamadan in northwest Persia in 1911 to take charge of the company's production there.

Northwest Persia at the time was the center of much of the country's weaving for export trade. But Persia did not just interest Edwards and his American wife Clara, for its carpets. They both became fascinated by the history and culture which surrounded them.

Here is a picture of Gang Nameh, one of the most impressive relics of the ancient Persian Empire, just 5 km southwest of Hamadan.

It is a pair of inscriptions on the side of Alvand Mountain.

The one on the left was ordered by Darius the Great (521-485 BC) and the one on the right by Xerxes the Great (485-65 BC).

Each section is carved in three languages -- Old Persian, Neo-Babylonian and Neo-Elamite – and describe the lineage and deeds of each king.

Both Cecil and Clara began to write about the world around them as they made Persia their home for the next 12 years. He tried fiction and she wrote detailed letters to relatives which are now collected in the archives of Bryn Mawr College, her alma mater.

Cecil's first published book, a collection of short stories, was "The Persian Caravan." It appeared in 1928 and was a collection of unrelated tales whose exotic characters ranged from aghas, to Russian officers, to British missionaries – all apparently inspired by the people he saw around him. The text is occasionally sprinkled with ghazels by the poet Hafez.

Despite Edward's profession, "The Persian Caravan" rarely mentions carpets -- except when describing a luxurious setting. As in this passage, when an unidentified narrator visits a friend, a former defense minister, who has been arrested by the leader of a palace coup:

"My host had ordered his servants to prepare lunch in the posthouse. He ushered me, in due course, into the principal chamber. I found the earth floor garnished with a noble carpet from Kashan, where the best carpets in the world are woven. On the carpet a printed cloth was spread. It was dotted with little bowls of stews and sweetmeats; and like a sun, in the centre of that fragrant system, lay a huge metal platter, heaped with steaming...‎"

It is interesting that Edwards mentions Kashan carpets as the best in the world because, much later, when he wrote his definitive book on Persian carpets he would repeatedly say the same.

So much so, in fact, that some modern critics fault him for devoting too much time to Kashan's production compared to his survey of the rest of the Persian carpets of his time.

Here is another Kashan carpet of the kind Edwards might have admired. It is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Just when Edwards decided to write about the Persian carpet industry is unclear. But when the Edwards left Persia for London in 1923, his book was still a quarter of a century away from appearing.

In London, Edwards was managing director of OCM and is credited with making the decision to expand the company's market to America. In partnership with one of the biggest importers in the US market – Fritz and La Rue – OCM's rugs entered virtually every major department store chain in the United States in the years leading up to World War II.

Yet Edwards' interests remained both intellectual and commercial as he rose to the top of his profession. He was an early pioneer of globalization, increasingly moving production to India to make oriental carpets more affordable to average buyers. But he and Clara also developed firm friendships with historian Arnold Toynbee and the William Blake bibliographer Geoffrey Keynes.

Finally in 1948 the couple returned again to Persia (renamed in 1935 as Iran). The goal was for Cecil to complete research for his book which would be entitled, "The Persian Carpet: A Survey of the Carpet Weaving Industry of Persia."

The book was published five years later, in 1953. But by a sad twist of fate, both Cecil's and Clara's health were worsening by then. Clara's mind had begun to fail and in 1951 she entered a retreat near Brighton. Cecil died in 1953, followed closely by Clara in 1955.

The Edwards' story ends sadly but it is one of a fascinating life lived at a fascinating time.

"The Persian Carpet" won the highest accolades it could hope to win by being published to acclaim in English and also being translated into Farsi.

And the saga of the OCM has inspired another full book of its own.

It is "Three Camels To Smyrna: Times of War and Peace in Turkey, Persia, India, Afghanistan & Nepal 1907-1986 - The Story of the Oriental Carpet Manufacturers Company."

The book, by Antony Wynn, explores the dramatic history of the Near and Middle East in the twentieth century from the point of view of the men and women involved in the carpet trade.

Among them, to be sure, are A. Cecil and Clara Edwards.


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New York International Carpet Show Set For September

NEW YORK, March 15, 2012 --

There are a handful of must-go carpet shows for anyone who wants to see the incredible variety of top quality pieces being made in the carpet world today. One of these is the New York International Carpet Show, which takes place in New York in September. The organizers recently sent us this announcement about the upcoming show:

There's a continuing revolution in the handmade carpet industry for new, fashion-forward design that uses sustainable materials, innovative textures and a wide range of customer-friendly colors. In this economy, carpets have to be fresh and sell for good value. Exciting designs with showstopping colors and textures make heads turn.

To meet this growing demand, Dennis Dodds created the New York International Carpet Show that has been held each September during the peak buying season for the past eight years. Dates for the 2012 Fall Market trade event are Sunday through Tuesday, September 9th, 10th and 11th. Mark your calendars now.

Dodds, who is also an architect and a collector of rare antique tribal rugs, gives credit to his top exhibitors: “They are the main marketmakers -- the movers and shakers. They meet uncertainty with creative ideas and stunning carpets that resonate with consumers in the marketplace.”

Acclaimed as one of the industry’s “must-go” trade sources for high-end handmade carpets, NYICS is held at the prestigious 7 West New York Showrooms, directly across from the Empire State Building at 5th Avenue and 34th Street in midtown Manhattan. This convenient location is just steps away from New York’s carpet district and creates an unequalled anchor destination in the middle of New York City.

“NYICS elevates the brands of our artisan carpetmakers and extends our reach into a larger and more varied pool of buyers,” says Dodds. A national trade database and promotion to the influential design community pulls new faces to NYICS. The show will be cross-marketed with the huge New York Home Fashions Market that runs the same week.

Buyers attending NYICS have come to expect ravishing one-of-a-kind-carpets, deep programs, stunning new collections and custom capabilities from top importers. Dodds summarizes the show: “We’re a boutique event and a catalyst for business. This is a design driven, high-end carpet space where buyers will make bigger profits.”

To find out more, go to www.NYICS.com, or contact NYICS1@juno.com.

(Photo is of the carpet "Reflection-Sky" designed and produced by Wool & Silk Rugs. The rug won the Best Modern Design Deluxe Award at Domotex 2012 as a premier example of imaginative new rugs being woven today.)

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DOBAG Rugs And The Return To Natural Colors

ISTANBUL, February 15, 2012 -- One of the greatest changes in carpet making in modern times is the return to natural dyes.

It began in Turkey in the 1960s, and it is the story of largely one man: a German chemist. His work in recreating natural dyes helped launch a project to convince villager weavers to give up synthetic dyes and return to traditional plant-based dyes instead.

Many of those plant dyes had disappeared from rugs for more than a century.

The result was a revolution in color whose success has inspired thousands of other producers around the carpet world to now move partly or wholly back to using natural dyes, too.

The name of the chemist is Harald Boehmer and the project, carried out by a Turkish university, is the Natural Dye Research and Development Project, better known by its Turkish acronym DOBAG.

The rugs that the Turkish villages in the DOBAG project produced – and still produce – are simply called DOBAGs. Here, and at the top of the page are photos of two DOBAGs, both available from Peter Linden in Dublin.

Boehmer came to Istanbul in the 1960s to teach chemistry and other sciences at the German School and with his wife Renate soon became fascinated by Turkish carpets. It was at a time when Turkish carpets had been in decline for decades under the pressures of mass production and the urge to use ever cheaper synthetic dyes to lower costs.

Instead of being repelled by the poor quality rugs, the Boehmers were intrigued. Why, they wondered, were the centuries-old rugs they saw in Turkish museums so vastly superior to Turkey's modern production?

The answer, they decided, was not the quality of the weaving but the use of chemical dyes in place of the older rug's plant-based ones.

But if the Boehmers became interested in the old natural dyes, learning how to recreate them set the science-minded couple off on a lifetime journey.

The Boehmers began scouring the Turkish countryside to find weavers old enough to still remember what plants their grandparents used to extract colors. At the same time, they conducted their own analysis of old rugs using the laboratory technique of chromatography.

Putting the two sources of information together, they were eventually able to reconstruct all of the missing natural dyes.

With support from Istanbul's Marmara University, the next phase was to interest villagers in again producing the old dyes and weaving with them. The project began with villages in Canakkale province bordering the Dardanelle Straits, expanded to more villages in Turkey's southwest, and DOBAG rugs were born.

To appreciate just how revolutionary was the idea of returning to natural dyes, it is interesting to recall the history of the synthetic dye industry, which developed in Britain and Germany in the mid 1800s and whose products spread to weavers across the world.

In 1856, an English chemistry student, William Perkins, discovered synthetic dyes while attempting to synthesize quinine, used as a medicine against malaria. The purple dye he created inexpensively by accident was so obviously desirable to the textile industry that he immediately applied for a patent.

Perkin's professor, Wilhelm von Hoffmann, also recognized the significance of the accidental discovery. He later returned to his home country of Germany and set off a race between German universities and British ones to synthesize more, better, and cheaper colors.

The new dyes spread quickly to the carpet world because the second half of the 19th century was also a time when European demand for oriental carpets was exploding. A series of international expositions between 1851 and 1876 had fanned huge interest in eastern – and particularly Turkish carpets – and demand suddenly outstripped supply.

Jane Peterson describes neatly why the Turkish carpet industry embraced the new synthetic dyes in her 1991 article "A Passion for Color," published in Saudi Aramco Magazine:

"Rug prices increased. But higher prices could neither speed up the laborious hand-work needed to collect raw materials for natural dyes, nor increase the supply of those dye plants that were not cultivated crops."

Here is a picture of one plant traditionally used in Turkey to produce yellow: chamomile

The new synthetic dyes offered multiple advantages. They not only were available in quantity, they also were cheaper and less-time consuming to use than plant dyes. By the 1880s the majority of Turkey's big carpet manufactories were using them and by the eve of World War I even nomad and peasant weavers were, too.

The synthetic dyes colors reigned – and still reign – so supreme that rug dealers estimate 95 percent of the rugs available on the market today are made with chemical dyes.

Thus, for natural colors to challenge that supremacy today requires not only changing the weaving world's work habits and economic patterns, it also means changing what have become established tastes among carpet buyers.

Both synthetic and natural dyes have their admirers.

Synthetic dyes, being the result of a chemical process, produce monochrome colors. If the color is red, it is a single shade of red, with no variations of shades within it.

That means every piece of red-dyed yarn will be identical, producing a near-perfect evenness of color. When the carpet is woven, the red knots will stand out in full contrast to the knots woven in other pure colors around it, creating a powerful effect.

By contrast, natural dyes produce polychrome colors. If the color is red, there are multiple shades of red in it because that is how colors occur in nature. The same spontaneity of multiple shades carries over to the plant-dyed yarn.

When the carpet is woven, these subtle variations of hues will be apparent in each red knot. And because all the other plant-dyed colors in the carpet equally contain multiple shades, the colors overall will subtly harmonize. The contrasts between them will be softened, creating a mellow effect.

This photo shows DOBAG weavers preparing dyes by boiling plants they have collected.

As more rug producers across the carpet world now explore returning to natural dyes, the question will be how customers adapt to the suddenly expanded range of choices.

Will they strongly prefer either natural or synthetic colors over one another or – perhaps more likely -- will they find a place for both in their homes?

The pleasure for every carpet lover will be in exploring the possibilities and, in the process, the wonderful world of colors around us.

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Bad Goods: How Counterfeiters Weave Antique Rugs From Scratch

Fakes of antique carpets are nothing new in the rug business. But today's versions are technically so good that they can fool even top rug experts and sell for big money. How do the counterfeiters do it? Textile researcher and traveler Vedat Karadag has been looking into the question for 15 years from his home base in Istanbul and shares this information.

ISTANBUL, January 11, 2012 -- Counterfeits of old Turkish carpets began to appear in the marketplace in the first half of the 20th century. At that time, they were usually aimed at tourists or amateur rug collectors and were easy enough for experts to detect.

But in recent years a new, technically sophisticated production of fakes has arisen in Turkey, Iran, and the Caucasus that is so good that the new rugs pose a real danger to the antique market.

The new techniques began to develop in the 1980s, when there was a renaissance of rug repair in Turkey and restorers became very skillful in matching colors and wool quality as they repaired old rugs.

In order to match the colors and feel of old wool during a restoration, they moved pile knots from one part of a rug to another or even borrowed the knots from an entirely different old rug if it had an adequately long pile.

However, rugs were not just restored this way. They were also sometimes upgraded and made to look older than the evidence their original dyes presented.

If there was a limited amount of synthetic color in a rug, it could be completely replaced with natural colors. Once the offending colors were gone, the rug could be marketed as older and sold for more money.

In these pictures of restored rugs, we see both chemical color replacement and antique restoration.


Here the restorers have taken out chemical dyed orange color knots.


And here the chemical orange dyed knots have been replaced with natural dyed antique madder color knots.

It wasn't long before the high prices that these restored and upgraded rugs brought in the marketplace inspired some restorers to explore methods that would allow them to weave “old” rugs from scratch.

However, there were some technical problems to overcome.

The primary one is that old rugs have a different look and they feel different than new rugs made from new wool. Over time, exposure to light and air softens a rug's colors, increases the shininess of the wool, and opens up the wool fiber so that an old rug has the appearance and feel of age and use.

To obtain old wool for new "antiques", restorers turned to old kilims from Anatolia, Iran, and the Caucasus. These were pieces that were relatively inexpensive, either because they were damaged, or had very plain designs, or were originally un-dyed.

Unraveling these kilims gives a good yield of yarns in a variety of colors. So much so, that the price of these types of kilims actually began to rise with the increased demand for them from restorers.

Here are the unraveled yarns from old fragments.

But there is a problem with getting wool from old kilims. The yarn is crimped from being squeezed for years between warp strings and has to be made to relax enough to use it again in knotting a new rug.

Here is a close-up of the crimped yarn that comes from a vegetable dyed kilim.

Nevertheless, rug restorers always find a way to solve a problem. To relax the wool, they hit upon the idea of boiling it in a cauldron of hot water. The result is that the wool softens and loses its twist.

The softened yarns after the boiling and untwisting process.

Just as there is the question of where to get old wool for weaving an antique, so is there the question of where to get an old rug foundation on which to tie the new knots. The restorers solved that problem in another clever way: they took an old rug of little value and stripped it of its original knots until only the foundation remained.

Here is an Anatolian yastik that is of little vaule because of its washed-out chemical colors and not very exciting or well-executed design.

And here is the same rug with all of the knots picked out of the foundation.

We don’t know what happened to this foundation after all of the knots were picked out. But we can be sure that the new colors were vibrant and the design was well executed, to the best of the faker’s imagination.

Finally, there is the problem of making a newly woven pile look worn and aged.

Counterfeiters have found that rubbing the pile with a smooth pumice stone is much more convincing than clipping the blacks and browns with scissors. Whereas clipping leaves the wool with small, sharply cut ends, rubbing with pumice makes the ends of the fibers look naturally worn, even under examination with a magnifying glass.

The rubbing helps duplicate the effect seen in old carpets, where the ingredients in black and brown dyes have caused the wool to deteriorate faster than the wool dyed with other colors.

But there are other ways to do it, too:

Sheep shearers being used to make the pile lower in places -- also an effective method.

The pile can be burned with a strong flame and then rubbed and cut away to make different colors have slightly different pile heights. This is another technique to simulate natural wear and age.

Dust tumblers have been used for generations in Turkey to get the dust out of rugs before they are washed. If you tumble an old rug in there for a little while, the dust comes out. If you leave a new rug in there long enough, it becomes more pliable and the edges and ends get some wear, a little bit like an old rug.

The strong summer sun of Anatolia is another great tool for aging rugs. They are left in the sun for weeks at a time in order to soften the colors. Often a rooftop is used for maximum sun exposure.

Of course, a little light traffic on a rug is good, too, and heavier traffic is probably even better. Great spots with heavy traffic are a restaurant or even a sidewalk.

Heavier traffic and busier streets have a fast effect on aging process.

Once the counterfeiters work is done, all that is left to do is to admire their artistry. And, as these pictures show, the results can be stunning.

Here is a great looking, all finished fake of a late 19th century southwest Iranian Gabbeh rug.

This is a counterfeit 17th century Anatolian rug.

Here is a counterfeited fragment which can be sold as all that remains of an 18th century Anatolian prayer rug. It is placed beside a genuine 18th century Anatolian prayer rug for comparison.

And here is a very fine forgery of an antique flat-weave sumac with a Laila & Majnun design from the epic Islamic love poem of the same name.

The forgery is of this genuine antique Layla & Majnun piece, which is worn with true age.

Are there ways that true antique rug lovers can protect themselves from the forgers' ever increasing skills?

One of the best keys may be training ourselves to recognize the lanolin content in the wool fibres.

A sheep's natural wool is naturally coated in lanolin, a substance which prevents the wool fibers from locking together. The amount of lanolin in the wool diminishes as a rug ages over decades and centuries but it is not easy for forgers to reduce it artificially.

It is not that difficult to see the differences in the wool with a close up examination or by feeling the wool with your palm and the tips of your fingers.

Train your hands and palm by touching as many pieces as you possibly can. You will develop a feel for it. Study your own pieces with magnifiers. You will see how real wool fibers look with natural use.

Another good safeguard against forgeries is to trust your instincts and your taste.

Fakers often make aesthetic mistakes. They sometimes put fake repairs into the flat woven ends of rugs so that you will easily spot the fake repair but not realize that the whole rug is newly woven.

If you sense your eye is being deliberately distracted, there's a good chance it is.

Faking old rugs is not just an Anatolian phenomenon. Many other weaving areas have followed the Turkish lead. Convincing copies of old Gabbeh rugs come from Iran, as do fake Shahsevan flatweaves.

And just as the rug business is a cross-border industry, the counterfeiting business has become one, too.

Iranian dealers have employed Turkmen weavers in Afghanistan to copy anqique Turkmen pieces, while Anatolian traders have financed the faking of antique Caucasian rugs in the Caucasus and of Kaitag embroideries in Daghestan. Even, India is on the same path with their famous Muhgal and local design embroideries.

It is interesting to think that if the last century had its legendary Theodor Tuduc (1888 – 1983), the Romanian carpet forger whose work was so good it was collected by museums, this century may produce yet greater counterfeit artists. The sophistication of techniques available to forgers only keeps growing and with it so does the challenge of separating genuine antiques from look-alikes.

Vedat Karadag heads Cultural Travel, an Istanbul-based company specializing in custom-designed travel for small groups or individuals interested in exploring Anatolia or the Silk Road countries of Central Asia. Textiles are one of his many areas of interest and expertise.

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Turkmen Carpets: From Bukhara To The Black Desert

BUKHARA, Dec. 17, 2011 – When the "red rugs of Central Asia" first arrived in Western Europe in the mid-to-late 1800s, nobody knew much about where they came from.

They trickled out through the Russian Empire and bore an exotic name: Bokhara carpets. But apart from the fact Bokhara (today Bukhara in Uzbekistan) was a legendary city on the Silk Road, the name gave no hints of the rugs' origins.

Another name commonly used in Victorian England for the carpets told even less: "Gentlemen's Carpets." They were called that because they particularly appealed to men as furnishings for dens and studies.

It took until our present day before people widely realized that the red rugs' only relation with Bukhara was that the city's bazaars were the collection point for sending them to Western markets. And that, in fact, the carpets were woven by a specific people that mostly live far away from Bukhara: the Turkmen.

The Turkmen who sent their carpets to the bazaar inhabit a vast expanse of arid land between the Amu Darya river and the Caspian Sea that mostly is made up of the Kara Kum Desert, or "Black Sand" Desert. Today, much of that land is the country of Turkmenistan, but there are also populations of Turkmen living across the borders of Iran and Afghanistan.

Traditionally, the Turkmen were both a nomadic and settled people, largely depending on how much water was available. They wove everything needed for a nomadic lifestyle but also wove many of the same items when residing in towns and villages.

Here is a picture of a nomadic Turkmen family posing on a carpet outside their felt yurt. It was taken by the Russian photographer Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky in the early 1900s when Turkmenistan was part of the Russian Empire.

When the Turkmen arrived in the region is uncertain, but they were part of a vast migration of Turkic peoples who moved into the Caspian area, northern Iran and Anatolia around 1,000 AD. Their language belongs to the same family of languages – Oghuz Turk – as those spoken in Turkey, Azerbaijan, and by the Turkic tribes of Iran.

It is often said that to like Turkmen carpets, one must like the color red. And that is true. Early Turkmen carpets are all dyed in shades of red taken from the madder plant and the shades vary from brick-colored to a dark purple brown. Usually, the other color in the carpets is black.

But if this traditional color palette seems limited, the effects achieved are both striking and subtle. And part of the reason is that the colors heighten, rather than compete with, the carpets' decorative pattern of mysterious tribal "guls."

The guls, the Persian and Turkmen word for flower, are usually octagonal forms that are quartered and placed in rows. Often a large gul will alternate with a subsidiary one, as in this photo of guls in a main carpet woven by the Tekke tribe.

Here the main gul is a variation of a type of gul known as a "gulli (or gushly) gul." The capet is available from Knights Antiques in Britain.

The world of Turkmen carpets is a world of guls and guls themselves are part of the common artistic heritage of the Silk Roads. Historically, guls (known as "rosettes" is Western art history) are found in silk fabrics made by civilizations up and down the length of the road, from the Chinese to the Soghdians, to the Sassanians to the Byzantines.

But just what the Turkmen guls represent is not certain.

According to the Turkmen themselves, they symbolize birds or parts of birds. But the way some guls are used more than others by different Turkmen tribes has long created a debate among Western rug experts over whether they also serve as identifying totems for the tribes that weave them. Research is still needed to answer the question.

Often, Turkmen carpets include both large guls and subsidiary guls arranged in an endless repeat pattern. The arrangement creates an optical illusion in which the eye connects the large guls into one pattern of compartments and the small guls into another, so the two patterns appear to be overlying.

The "double-compartment" pattern is visible in this carpet woven by the Yomut tribe. The large guls are variation of a type of gul known as a "tauk nuska gul." The capet is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The double-compartment pattern may be another fascinating link between Turkmen carpets and the ancient Silk Road trading routes. The design, using various kinds of elements, has been found across the ancient world, from Chinese textiles to ceiling drawings in Egyptian tombs.

Today, Turkmen carpets are well known to rug collectors and the early generic names like "Bokhara" are less and less used. But finding a new way to name them has proved difficult because, unlike most rugs, they cannot be reliably named after specific geographical regions where they were woven.

Turkmen tribes were historically so mobile -- claiming and abandoning territories as their neighbor's lost or gained strength -- that it makes more sense to name the carpets after the tribes which wove them rather than the tribe's location at the time.

Here is a map of Central Asia showing the Turkmen's homeland, which includes parts of northeastern Iran and northwestern Afghanistan.

The effects of the Turkmen's mobility can be seen in some of the tribes' rugs. The guls of the Yomut (or Yomud) tribe which had long contact with Persia (and which mostly lives in northeastern Iran today) are believed to show adaptations of complex Persian floral forms.

An example can be seen in the photo at the top of this page of a Yomut carpet with kepsi guls. The carpet is available from James Cohen in Milan.

Over the centuries, as more and more Tukmen moved from nomadism to settled life, the carpets of the tribes which settled underwent more changes than those which stayed nomadic.

One of the earliest tribes to settle appears to have been the Chodor. The designs of main their carpets more varied than those of the other tribes and use more colors.

Here is an example of a Chodor carpet with ertmen guls. It is available from Joshua Lumley near London.

In the case of many nomadic groups elsewhere in the world, settling has meant a loss of weaving traditions.

But in the Turkmen case, settled women maintained their weaving traditions as a way to supplement their family income. Over time the volume of rugs they produced far outpaced those woven by their nomadic sisters.

Thus the rugs of the Saryk, which remained nomadic longer than any other Turkmen tribe, until the end of the 19th century, are considerably rarer than those of other groups.

Another tribe whose rugs are rare is the Salor – but for a different reason. The Salor, long considered among the oldest of the Turkmen tribes, disappeared at some time in the 19th century, leaving behind their weavings as their only legacy.

At what point the weavings of settled Turkmen tribe turned into a major regional business sensitive to the changing tastes of buyers is unclear.

But by the time the traditional red rugs came to the attention of Western enthusiasts, there was already production of another class of Turkmen carpets – not traditional at all – which were aimed at the sophisticated tastes of urban centers such as Bukhara, Samarkand, and far beyond.

These rugs were the so-called "Beshir" carpets, named not after a tribe but one of the towns where they were woven along the Amu Darya river, which flows between Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Here is a Beshir carpet available from Knights Antiques in Britain. Some other Beshir carpets show the influence of popular ikat designs taken from Central Asia's vibrant textile industry of the same time.

Exactly who wove the Beshir carpets is unclear, because historically these towns were home to a mixed population of Turkmens from different tribes and even indigenous Iranian people who pre-dated the Turkic conquest of Central Asia.

But if Beshir carpets show how Turkmen weavers could adapt to market tastes, the more remarkable thing about Turkmen carpets overall remains how much they have remained true to tradition over the centuries.

An example among many are the carpets woven the Ersari tribe, which has been mostly sedentary since 17th c. Their large carpets are too big for a yurt, so they were clearly made for urban buyers, but their designs stayed traditional.

As experts Robert Pinner and Murray L. Eiland, Jr. note in their 1999 book 'Between the Black Desert and the Red: Turkmen Carpets from the Widersperg Collection':

"The same gols have been used from the pre-commercial into the commercial period and the designs have changed little … The number of colors has tended to decline from the six or nine colors used in earlier rugs to sometimes only three or four in later rugs, (but) the guls will be drawn in a strikingly similar manner."

Here is modern Ersari carpet with another of the many variations of the gulli gul. It is available from Nomad Rugs in San Francisco.

Traditionally, Turkmen weavers not only produced main carpets for the floors of yurts but also carpet-like hangings to cover the yurt doorway (ensi), bags of different types and sizes for storage and transport (chuvals and torbas), decorative trappings used in wedding rituals (azmylik), tent bands and tent pole covers. Many of these smaller weavings show more variations in design than do the carpets.

Perhaps due to this variety, Turkmen weavings of all kinds are today highly popular with collectors. According to Pinner and Eiland, there are more Turkmen weavings in private rug collections in the US and Germany – the two countries with the largest number of private rug collections in the world -- than rugs from anywhere else.

That's a long way for Turkmen rugs to have traveled from the days when they were simply all lumped together on Western markets as Red Rugs, Bokharas, or Gentlemen's Carpets.

And it is a tribute to the weavers' skills that today their work has not just put the Turkmen people on the world's art map, but even the names of their own individual tribes.

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Articles about Turkmen Rugs, Designs, History, and Tribes

Persia's Signature Carpets Of The Late 19th, Early 20th Centuries

TEHRAN, Nov. 26, 2011 – If there is a gold standard for Persian carpets produced at the turn of the last century, it is the magnificent rugs woven and signed by master artists working in small studios.

These signature rugs remain legendary today, as do the names of the "ustads", or master weavers, who designed them.

Just five of the best known master weavers are:

Mohammad Hassan Mohtashem, working in Kashan in the late 1800s.

Aboul Ghasem Kermani, in Kerman at the turn of the last century.

Hajji Jalili, in Tabriz at the turn of the last century.

Fatollah Habibian, in Nain in the early to mid 1900s.

Agha Reza Seyrafian (or Seirafian), in Isfahan in the early to mid 1900s.

These masters, and the workshops they led, were so innovative in reworking traditional designs, devising new ones, and playing with color palettes that they were the recognized trend setters of their time.

Their work can be stunningly beautiful.

At the top of this page is a signed carpet by Aboul Ghasem Kermani. It is a hymn to ancient Persian history that depicts in astonishing detail the ruins of Persepolis, the 5th century BC palace of Darius I and Xerxes. The carpet is available from the Nazmiyal Collection of New York.

Here is another signed carpet by Aboul Ghasem Kermani. This one shows the designer's ability to work equally well with floral patterns. It, too, is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The carpets of these master weavers have been copied so many times since their deaths that the weavers' names have become generic today for whole types of carpets based on their designs.

But the masters' original works have never been equaled and may well never be. That is because they are the product of a historical moment when Persia's carpet industry was reviving rapidly after centuries of neglect and the spirit of a renaissance was in the air.

The carpet industry had suffered badly during the period of political upheavals that wracked Persia in the 1700s and early 1800s and by the time stability returned many things had changed dramatically.

The royal court system, long the patron for the best arts, was severely weakened and economic power was increasingly passing into the hands of wealthy merchant families. They, and customers in Europe where Orientalism was by now in full swing, became a rich new market for Persian carpet producers who competed fiercely to win it.

The result was the birth of the modern workshop system of carpet production, the system which remains the basis for most oriental rug production today. Unlike the large court-supported workshops of the past, these new ateliers had to be smaller to be commercially successful. And whereas the court workshops had valued tradition above all, now there was increasing room for innovation, as well.

Here is a carpet by the master weaver Seyrafian available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

The best workshops of the late 19th century and early 20th century in Persia functioned much like artists' studios.

The masters were sought after by the wealthiest customers, who commissioned rugs and paid in advance. The advance payment, in turn, provided the capital for the master weavers to obtain the best materials and hire highly skilled artisans.

Just how much status the customers accorded the master weavers was shown by the practice of signing the master's name into the rugs as they were woven – something virtually unknown under the court patronage system. The date the carpet was woven was also sometimes included.

Over the decades from the late 1800s to the mid-1900s, the master weavers brought new fame to many of Iran's traditional weaving centers. At times, they were directly associated with the successful revival of an individual city's weaving industry after it had slumped drastically during the previous centuries.

The master weaver Mohtashem is one example. He began work in Kashan around the 1880s at a time when the city's carpet weavers had long ago switched to making shawls. But even as he succeeded in the textile business, he could see it would soon collapse under the pressure of the new machine-produced textiles flooding in from Europe.

Here is a carpet by the master weaver Mohtashem available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

According to legend, Mohtashem re-invented himself, and the city's carpet industry, when he married a woman from another famous carpet center, Sultanabad, who was a skilled rug weaver.

He provided her with Merino wool imported from Manchester – the wool he usually used for textiles – and discovered its high quality allowed a higher knot count for creating detailed motifs with a high pile.

The revival of Kashan's carpet industry, which had been dormant since the fall of the Safavid dynasty in 1723, quickly followed.

In 1890, records show, there were only three operating looms in Kashan. By 1900, there were 1,500 and by 1949 there were 4,000. Fueling most of the growth was Mohtashem's innovation – the use of Merino wool – which continued until the imported wool market crashed with the Great Depression.

Ultimately, Mohtashem's innovation was so successful that his own name became the generic name for all the Kashan carpets woven with Merino wool, which sometimes were also known as "Manchester Kashans." Only the fact that some of Mohtashem's own signed carpets remain helps to preserve the memory of the man himself, about whom little more is known.

A similar revival took place in Nain and is attributed to another of the master weavers, Habibian.

Here is an example of a Nain carpet available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Legend has it that Habibian was the son of the owner of a textile workshop producing abas, a woolen outer garment that usually is striped.

When the market for abas collapsed because clothing fashions were becoming more European in the early 1900s, Habibian switched full time to carpets along with his brother Mohammad.

The Habibians helped turned Nain, which previously had no history as a carpet center, into a city with a reputation for exceptionally fine pieces. Both the Habibian brothers lived and worked in Nain for decades before Mohammad died in 1986 and Fatollah in 1994.

Most of the Habibians' rugs bear their names but that is not the case for all master weavers. In many cases, just a few signed rugs remain and in others cases they are so rare that experts wonder whether some legendary names actually refer to a style rather than to an individual master and his workshop.

Hadji Jalili is one such example. The name is routinely used in the rug business to describe the beautiful floral rugs woven in Tabriz at the end of the 19th century. It also is believed to refer to a particular designer whose success in developing a trademark mix of lighter colors of pinks, gold and grays that helped rouse the famous weaving city from a long period of dormancy.

Here is a Hadji Jalili carpet available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Yet so many of the best Tabriz carpets have since been attributed to Hadji Jalili that they could not possibly all have been woven by a single master's atelier.

So, how should one regard the name Hadji Jalili?

Jason Nazmiyal, whose Nazmiyal Collection deals in antique rugs, says there are two possibilities.

When a master weaver has signed a carpet, then the signature offers clear documentation that the master existed and that the rug originated in his atelier.

But when this documentation provided by a signature does not exist, Nazmiyal says, it may make better sense to think of a master's name as the name of a period of weaving rather than just one person.

"The masters were trendsetters and the look they developed was what everyone was following, the customers and the other weavers," he notes. "They were like top fashion designers today and their impact was far bigger than what they alone produced."

Looking at it that way recognizes that – many decades later – it is not always possible to distinguish designers from the fashions they create and those they inspire. The mystery of who exactly Hadji Jalili was may never be solved, but the beauty of the work attributed to him will never be forgotten.

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The Baroque Era: When Europe Fell Out Of Love With Oriental Carpets

PARIS, October 22, 2011 – It is a strange thing that during Europe's long love affair with oriental carpets, the love once cooled for almost a hundred years.

That period roughly corresponds to Europe's Baroque era when, instead of importing oriental carpets as they had for centuries, European nobility began buying European-made carpets instead.

Those carpets, like the Savonnerie carpet shown here, looked nothing like the Turkish and Persian styles depicted in the Renaissance paintings of earlier generations. Rather, they were specifically woven in Europe beginning around 1644 to compliment the new baroque architecture of European palaces and mansions.

In fact, the new European carpets did not just compliment baroque architecture, they often directly imitated baroque ceiling designs. That enabled Europe's designers to do what they had never done so lavishly before: swaddle the wealthy in a single style of interior decoration from head to foot.

The single style – Baroque and its spin-off Rococo - conveyed power and opulence and corresponded with Europe's own rising sense of economic wealth and importance.

Still, if the development of French-made Savonnerie and Aubusson carpets, or similar Axminster and Wilton carpets in Britain, suggests that Europeans somehow entirely lost interest in Eastern designs at this time, the impression would be wrong.

Ironically, the Baroque Era in which Europeans lost interest in Oriental rugs coincides with what was Europe's greatest ever period of fascination with all things Turkish. That fascination was so widespread that it had a name: Turquerie.

Here is a portrait of Austro-Hungarian Empress Maria Theresa at the height of the Turquerie fad which swept Europe in the 1600s and 1700s. She is dressed in a Turkish costume and is holding a mask. It was painted circa 1744 by Martin van Meytens.

How the Turquerie fad took shape and why it did not include rugs is one of the stranger stories in carpet history. After all, Turquerie – the French-coined word for Europe's taste for Turkish styles – could be found in many other arts: from dress, to fabrics, to interiors, to porcelain.

To understand Turquerie – which was a precursor of, but quite different from, Orientalism – one has to return to Europe of the 1600s. It was a time when Europe's relations with the Ottoman Empire changed dramatically.

Prior to the the mid-1600s, the Ottoman Empire had been Europe's most feared neighbor. The Empire had grown with astonishing speed from its start two centuries earlier and directly annexed much of Eastern Europe, including Greece.

But by the mid-1600s, the Ottoman's power to expand deeper into Europe was clearly spent. The Empire's second attempt to take Vienna with a 60 day siege in 1683 ended in a disastrous route and, though Eastern Europe would remain under the Ottomans almost another two centuries years, fear of the Empire in the rest of Europe subsided.

Instead, Western Europeans suddenly became very interested in the art and lifestyle of the foe they no longer feared. To dress up for palace balls "alla Turca" became the rage. And the practice of drinking coffee – something that had previously reached only Venice from Istanbul -- suddenly spread across Europe.

In Vienna, one of the first cafes was the House under The Blue Bottle, which opened in 1686. Its origins, just three years after the Ottoman siege of the city, perfectly illustrates the new fascination with the East.

The Blue Bottle's proprietor, Georg Franz Kolschitzky, had lived in Istanbul as a young man and learned Turkish. During the siege he used his language skills to spy on the Ottoman camp. Legend says that afterwards he claimed the coffee beans the Turks left behind as his share of the war booty and used them to start his business. For decades, he ran his café dressed as an Ottoman cafe owner, as this painting from the time shows.

Like any fad, Turquerie was a mix of reality and fantasy. It came when still very few Europeans traveled to the East and it was heavily influenced by Europeans' own imaginary visions of oriental luxury, Ottoman customs, and even harems.

But even if Turquerie was in large part make-believe, there is no doubt that genuine curiosity about -- and even admiration of the Ottoman Empire – was equally part of it.

When one of the most famous, and large-scale, weddings of the time took place in Dresden in 1719, the celebration included days of specially themed events.

On one of those days, the newlyweds (the Prince-elector of Saxony, Friedrich August II, and the Austrian Archduchess Maria Josepha) had a palace in ‘Turkish style’ erected complete with a corps of janissaries. The guests, who included an Ottoman ambassador, were requested to appear in Turkish costume.

Similarly, it became the rage for noble women to have their portraits painted wearing a Turkish costume and in an Oriental setting, sometimes even sitting on an oriental carpet.

Here is one portrait from the time, Mademoiselle de Clermont "en Sultane" painted in 1733 by Jean-Marc Nattier.

A much more famous sitter, the Marquise de Pompadour, commissioned three portraits of herself dressed as a Sultana in 1750. The portraits not only allowed the sitters to appear in exotic fashions but also to abandon their body-constricting corsets -- something that would not become possible again in Western fashion until the 1900s.

Men also took part. In the 1700s, it was in fashion for wealthy men to smoke Turkish tobacco in a Turkish pipe, sometimes wearing a Turkish robe. And when people went out to the opera, it was possible to find Turquerie there, too.

The most famous of the Turquerie operas – still played today – is Mozart's 'The Abduction from the Seraglio'. It was first presented in 1782, but 13 other similarly themed operas predate it. Often the productions clothed the singers in authentic Ottoman fashions, knowing that theater goers were curious about them.

Even in architecture Turquerie found a place, this time in the form of Ottoman-inspired pleasure domes.

Here is the central building of a "Türkischer Garten" built between the years of 1778-91 in southwestern Germany. It is part of the Schwetzingen Castle, the summer residence of the rulers of the then German state of Baden-Württemberg.

One could easily imagine that so much interest in the Ottoman Empire would have to increase interest in that most essential symbol of the orient of all – carpets. But the fact that Europe's taste in carpet patterns went in an entirely different direction may only prove that, ultimately, Turquerie was more a measure of Europe's growing sense of self assurance than of cosmopolitan tastes.

Throughout the 1600s, when Turquerie began, and through the 1700s as it continued, the "gout Turque" coincided with the greatest period of expansionism in European history. It was a fad in an epic period that included the transformation of the New World and the creation of sea trading networks and ultimately colonies across Asia.

That meant that the key status symbols European society would have to be European too. Whereas wealthy Europeans in the Renaissance showed off their Turkish carpets to underline their rich status, the people of the late 1600s and early 1700s centuries furnished their mansions with European-woven baroque carpets instead.

Here is an antique Axminster, woven in Britain, that reflects the English taste of the time. It is available from the Nazmiyal Collection in New York.

Interestingly, Europe's overwhelming preference for baroque carpets over oriental ones would not last long. By the mid 1700s, the taste for oriental carpets would begin returning with redoubled strength as Europe's view of the East started to dramatically change again.

This new change, seen most visibly in Napoleon's military expedition to Egypt in 1798, would come as Europeans directly entered into the life of the Orient as never before. It, too, would be accompanied by a new fad: Orientalism. But that is the subject of another story (see: Orientalism and Oriental Carpets).

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