A Persian masterpiece on view at the Met

Any rug enthusiasts visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art before 28 February 2027 can see this famous 16th-century 'Salting' rug. On loan from the Musée des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs de Lyon for the Met's exhibition Orientalism: Between Fact and Fantasy, it has not been on view for years, not even when the musée was open, and certainly not in the six years since it closed (reopening planned for 2030). It is also little published, and always appears dark, its fine detail always obscured.

This carpet perhaps represents the exhibition's themes in more ways than one. Like the show itself which straddles the Islamic art and 19th and 20th century European Painting galleries, this iconic rug is both a significant artefact of Islamic art, it belonged to the collector and dealer Adolphe Goupil, father-in-law to painter Jean-Léon Gérôme, and an item of decorative appeal since it appears as hung on a wall alongside other classical rugs in a painting of Goupil's richly Orientalist interior. While the exhibition explores the exchange between the Middle East and the West, and the artistic influences seen in the work of French-trained Ottoman artist Osman Hamdi Bey and painters such as Gérôme, this rug highlights another aspect of the period: the growing fascination with and emerging connoisseurship of carpets, textiles and Islamic art, without which the museum's galleries—and indeed its collection—might not exist.