Sotheby’s London sale on 6 November is led by a group of 25 carpets from the Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza collection in Madrid, more than half of which were acquired after the publication of May Beattie’s 1972 catalogue, though most do appear in Friedrich Spuhler’s 2003 effort. The consignment includes a handful of classical Ushak, Esfahan and Caucasian rugs and fragments, as well as some particularly good Chinese and East Turkestan rugs.
Lot 52, Kashgar silk carpet, Xinjiang, late 17th/early 18th century. 2.17 x 3.61 m (7' 1" x 11' 10"). Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Sotheby’s, London, 6 November 2018, estimate £80-120,000
Foremost among Baroness Thyssen’s post-Beattie carpets is a late 17th-century first-period silk Kashgar carpet with a dense, ‘Mughal-style’, floral design (lot 52), published in 1997 by Michael Franses in his article on ‘Silk pile covers from Western China’, in the Fourth HALI Annual (p.96, fig.14). It is estimated at £80-120,000. A large, square-format, late 18th/19th-century Ningxia dais cover with a ‘leaf- dragon’ medallion, last seen at auction at Sotheby’s, New York in May 1987, when it sold for $55,000 (HALI 36, p.84), is now estimated at £50-80,000 (lot 89).
Lot 89, The Scofield Thayer Ninghsia carpet, West China, late 18th/19th century. 4.24 x 4.14m (13'11" x 13'7"). Sotheby’s, London, 6 November 2018, estimate £50-80,000
The Thyssen lots also include a Kangxi-period rug in Ming style, another four pre-1800 Ningxias, and a silk Yarkand, as well as a couple of Esfahan ‘spiral vine’ carpets, a late 18th-century blueground Azerbaijan ‘animal’ carpet, a patchworked Ushak cloudband carpet fragment and two double-niche ‘Transylvanians’.
