In a welcome return to the saleroom, lot 50 in Christie’s London (King Street) carpet sale on 8 October 2013, the strikingly dramatic North Indian star and cross lattice pashmina pile carpet known as the Vanderbilt, is a former holder of the world record price for an oriental carpet at auction. Now estimated at £1.5 to £2 million, it could easily, in the present market for beautiful classical carpets of good provenance, make substantially more.
The Vanderbilt Star and Cross Lattice Carpet, Northern India, late 17th – first half 18th century. 3.84m x 4.11m, (12'7" x 13' 5½"). Christie’s, King Street, London, 8 October 2013, lot 50. Estimate £1.5-2 million
The Vanderbilt carpet is exceptional both because of its highly decorative, symmetrically balanced design and near perfect condition, and because it is a crucial art historical link between earlier 17th-century carpets of the classical Mughal period, and later North Indian court and commercial production. Most of its design elements have counterparts among classical-period North Indian carpets. Yet here those elements have been combined quite differently, to both a larger and smaller scale, and are supplemented with unexpected technical features.
Bought in Venice in 1878 by the American railroad magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt, it first decorated the walls of his Fifth Avenue mansion in Manhattan, before migrating to the family’s seventy-room Rhode Island ‘summer cottage’, The Breakers, in Newport, RI, which was inherited by Cornelius’s youngest daughter, Gladys Vanderbilt Széchényi. The carpet was removed from The Breakers for sale in 1977. In 1982 it turned up in France, where it was exhibited at the Centre Culturel de Boulogne-Billancourt, Paris, described in the accompanying French brochure as a 17th-century, pashmina-piled, Kashmir, millefleurs carpet. A colour illustration was published in HALI 4/3, 1982.
