NORTH WEST PERSIA, CIRCA 1920

The ‘PETAG’ company was founded in Berlin in 1911 by Heinrich Jacoby, himself a scholar of Asian carpets. The company owned workshops in Tabriz, where it produced only handwoven carpets at a time when other workshops were becoming increasingly mechanised. Weavers were given fine-quality kurk wool and only organic dyes to work with. Products of his workshop were also proudly signed with a çintimani motif derived from sixteenth-century Ottoman ceramics and textiles.

An important development which Jacoby was able to exploit was the publication of new books about carpets around the turn of the twentieth century, which for the first time gave readers access to complete colour illustrations of classical carpets. Though one such work was published in English, F. R. Martin, A History of Oriental Carpets before 1800 (Stockholm, 1908), the majority were produced by German-speaking scholars. Most important of these was the collector and archaeologist Friedrich Sarre, who published Orientalische Teppiche (Vienna, 1892) before collaborating with Hermann Trenkwald on the magnificent tome Alt-Orientalische Teppiche (Vienna, 1926). Through them, classical masterpieces in Western collections came to be more widely known and appreciated.

The design of the present carpet comes straight out of Sarre and Trenkwald’s book. Plate 52 is a reproduction of a late sixteenth century medallion Ushak carpet in the MAK in Vienna. The real carpet, however, has much more rounded medallions, though in the 1926 illustration they appear more angular at the edges. From the appearance of our carpet, it is clear that it was copied directly from the illustration rather than the original, probably by a designer who had never seen the original. The original carpet is an example of the Ushak ‘medallion’ group, which was woven in West Anatolia between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. Examples generally have a red ground with indigo medallions, and indigo-ground examples such as the one in the MAK are much scarcer. Two fragments of a similar indigo-ground carpet are also in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (acc.no. CIRC.156-1920 and CIRC.155-1920), and an example sold in these Rooms, 8 April 2014, lot 96.