Mughal Red, Unfaded

I was lucky enough to have Moshe Tabibnia walk me around his stand at Frieze Masters in London. He pointed out a number of special features on the pieces on display. The most interesting was that this is a rug in its own right, not assembled fragments of a shaped carpet. Carpet fragments often call for some detective work to establish their original size and proportions. His explanation made it clear that the width is complete at the upper end, from the poppies upwards. This establishes the original width and shows how much of the design is missing.

Only within this group of carpets could a rectangular carpet be called unusual. The group once belonged to the Maharaja of Jaipur and was housed for centuries in the Amer Palace, and it is associated with shaped carpets. The shading of the floral motifs is extremely well executed, giving the flowers and leaves a three-dimensional quality. For me, though, the most remarkable feature was the colour, which does not seem faded at all. Seen under good lighting in the small antique room on the stand, it is one of the most perfect expressions of Mughal red I have seen. It is not too dark, not too blue and has a hint of yellow, and it is perhaps a mixture of lac and madder. That combination is now known to occur in later Turkmen carpets too.

The carpet also has good provenance. It was formerly in the Wher Collection and is illustrated in Daniel Walker’s Flowers Underfoot, the definitive work on Mughal carpets (fig. 95, p. 98). It was also recorded as no. 19 by A.J.D. Campbell in his 1929 catalogue of the royal carpet collection for the Jaipur State Council. Campbell listed roughly 200 carpets, many of them woven around 1630–50 for the court of Mirza Raja Jai Singh I to furnish his palace at Amer.