The Textile Museum's centenary exhibition highlights a remarkable historic carpet

This dramatic carpet dominated the soaring vertical gallery wall in the second iteration of The Textile Museum's centenary exhibition 'Enduring Traditions', which closed on 20 December 2025 (1,2).

In his remarks at the exhibition reception, Bruce Baganz, chair of the museum's board of trustees, noted the carpet's circuitous route leading to its inevitable arrival as part of the museum's collection. The carpet was part of the collection of the museum's founder, George Hewitt Myers, as is evidenced by a black-and-white photograph in the TM archive showing it on the floor of his house.

However, it was never accessioned to the museum, and was later moved along with other household items to a family home in Virginia. According to the renowned authority Harold Keshishian, it was the only carpet that survived from that property after a flood, after which it entered his own collection, before he bequeathed it to the museum. Indeed, Charles Grant Ellis published it as plate 22 in his book Early Caucasian Rugs on the occasion of the museum's 50th anniversary in 1976; he describes it there as inventory number R2.53 in the Myers collection.

The carpet follows the so-called sickle-leaf design seen in 16th-century Kerman 'vase' carpets, and in particular two of the most celebrated examples of this type in the Gulbenkian Muscum in Lisbon (HALI 114, p. 85) and the world-record-breaking Clark carpet now in the MIA, Doha (HALI 212, P. 101).

The comparison to these two earlier venerable carpets raises an interesting point about design degeneration and originality. Typically, connoisseurship and expertise draw a line of beauty and refinement back to the original and 'purest' expression of a design. However, this example made some two centuries later carries the refinement of the original through to muscular energy in its effervescent expression of colour and dynamic composition.

The three-plane lattice of the 16th- century version is replaced by a chaotic overlaying of elements and an emphasis on bold colour juxtapositions and outlines. Here the design has moved beyond being derivative and become a different form of expression entirely.