World Rugs

A new United Kingdom (in fact Vauxhall, London SW8) Oriental rugs website has been launched by long-established wholesalers and importers Oriental Carpet Brokers.

Featuring a very wide range of both excellent antique and attractive modern decorative items, easily searchable via many options, plus an innovative Rug Knowledge Wiki, the site is obviously still in its infancy, but promises great things for thhe future.

All the inventory is for sale, although not yet via online ecommerce, although this looks likely to happen in near future.

The stock has many interesting and beautiful pieces, including outstanding groups of old and antique Afshar, Baluch and Kurdish tribal items, some exquisite antique Persian silk rugs from Heriz, Tabriz etc, an unusual number of nineteenth century French Aubusson tapestries in good sizes for hanging in the modern home, plus a wide range of contemporary Ziegler and Agra decorative carpets, many of which we suspect have yet to be illusttrated due to their large size.

Altogether a very promising, highly interactive addition to the online rug world, and definitely one to watch.

See the Pinner Lectures Event post above for times and place for the Pinner Lectures

Here is the programme (OCR transcript from fax, so excuse any typos!)

SATURDAY 11 JUNE 2005

1.45 Opening Remarks by Daniel Shaffer,
Executive Editor of HALI, and Michael
Franses, HALI’s co-founder

2.00 James Reid: Magic Feathers. Textile Art from Ancient Peru

3.00 Stefano lonescu: The Saxon Churches of Transylvania and their Rugs

4,00 Caroline Finkel: The Ottoman Sultans and the Holy Places of Islam

5.00 Jacqueline Simcox: Chinese Textiles of the Ming Dynasty

6.00 Michael Franses: Suzani Dowry Embroideries from the Emirates of Bukhara & Kokand

SUNDAY 12 JUNE 2005

2,00 James D. Burns: Antique Rugs of Kurdistan

3.00 Jenny Balfour-Paul: Indigo

4.00 Robert Chenciner: Madder

5,00 Gebhart Blazek: Berber Carpets in the Context of 20th Century Architecture

6,00 Bevis Longstreth: The Pazyryk Puzzle: Where,Why and by Whom?

NB Lectures, venue and times may be subject to change.

See following post for Pinner Lectures speakers’ bios

These notes on the Pinner speakers (see other postings today for event and lecture details) were also OCR’ed from a fax, so please forgive any typos etc.

Jenny Balfour-Paul, whose PhD was a study of indigo in North Africa and the Middle East, is an Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. She travels extensively and has published, lectured and broadcast on indigo and related subjects. Her publications include Indigo, Indigo in the Arab World, and numerous HALI articles,

Gebhart Blazek: Blazek has carried out field research in the area of North African carpets and textiles for fifteen years. He has written articles for HALI and Tribal magazine, lectured at international conferences and is a consultant to various public and private collections. He has galleries in Vienna and Graz in Austria.

James D. Burns is a trial attorney who practises law in Seattle. Washington. He has collected rugs and textiles from the Near and Far East for over forty years, and has written two books based on his collections: The Caucasus. Traditions in Weaving (1987) and Antique Rugs of Kurdistan (2003),

Robert Chenciner lectures, broadcasts and writes about the Caucasus. His books include Kaitag: Textile Art from Dagestan (1993), Daghestan: Tradition and Survival (1997) and Madder Red: A History of Luxury and Tradition (2000). He is a senior associate member of St Antony’s College, Oxford.

Caroline Finkel has lived in Istanbul for many years, and has travelled widely in Turkey and the former Ottoman lands. She has a PhD in Ottoman history from SOAS, has researched extensively in Ottoman archives and libraries, has written many articles and reviews for scholarly journals and also writes for the mainstream press on matters Ottoman. She has recently completed her third book, Osman’s Dream - The Story of the Ottoman Empire, 1300-1923 to be published in July 2005. In addition to her many and varied scholarly pursuits, she is currently involved in planning a long distance ride in eastern Anatolia in the footsteps of past travellers, that will result in a book and documentary film and also, it is hoped, provide a model for sustainable tourism in the region.

Michael Franses is one of the world’s foremost dealers in carpet and textile art. Co-founder of HALI, he is a frequent lecturer, exhibition organiser and a regular participant in international art fairs. Also a publisher, he has written extensively on carpets and textiles, including The Great Embroideries of Bukhara (2000), and numerous articles in HALI

Stefano lonescu was born in Romania and moved to Italy in 1975. His commitment to the safeguarding and promotion of Transylvania’s antique Ottoman carpet legacy led him to undertake a comprehensive research and cataloguing programme, culminating in the welcome publication earlier this year of Antique Ottoman Carpets in Transylvania.

Bevis Longstreth is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School. From 1981-84 he served as a Commissioner of the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In 1993, he retired from the practice of law as a senior partner in the New York firm of Debevoise & Plimpton to teach at Columbia Law School and pursue other interests, among which was writing. Over his career he has spoken and written many articles and two books on finance, corporate behaviour and the law. Spindle and Bow is his first work of fiction.

James W. Reid was born in the UK but has lived and worked in the US for many years. He is an artist whose interest in ancient Andean textiles began in 1969 with a chance glimpse of a Chancay textile in a gallery in Lima, Peru. Since then he has lectured and written extensively in both English and Spanish on the artistic aspects of pre-Columbian Peruvian textiles. The author of a biography of the English landscape artist Edward Seago, he is a regular contributor to HALI, and his numerous other publications include Textile Masterpieces of Ancient Peru (1986), The Textile Art of Peru (1991) and his newly published Magic Feathers: Textile Art from Ancient Peru.

Jacqueline Simcox is an independent London-based textile dealer and recognised authority on Chinese art. She was for many years a departmental director at Spink & Son, She is passionate and knowledgeable about Far Eastern and Central Asian textiles, and is considered to be one of the world’s leading experts on the subject, having published both in HALI and elsewhere, including, most recently, an article on Ming Festival Badges in the Art Gallery of New South Wales catalogue Celestial Silks.

Quite an interesting bunch, don’t you think?

Armenian bazaar wisdom: “if he says 12, he means 10, he will take 8, its worth 6, I will pay 4, so I will say 2″

In answer to a query on the OrientalRug discussion site on the relative merits of an Isfahan rug signed Davari [1] and a Nain carpet signed Habibian, Dr. Khosrow Sobhe of Los Angeles remarks:

The signature of the Isfahan rug is real, but the signature of the Nain is not. How can you tell? Take a close look at the signature of the Nain. It has entered (i.e. partially covered - ed.) the two lotus flowers which surround the signature. (A) real signature (knotted) by the weaver when making that part of the rug does not interfere with other (surrounding) parts of the design…. The signature should not over-ride other parts of the neighboring flowers, arabesques or details.

Here is the Habibian signature in question:

Bearing Dr. Sobhe’s remarks in mind, the above signature can be compared to the only Habibian signature captioned as authentic on the Habibian page of OldCarpet.com, namely this one:

While the OldCarpet.com Nain is a great deal finer and more beautiful than the OrientalRug Nain, and we may take OldCarpet.com’s word for it that it is authentic, does it bear out the ‘Sobhe test’? Maybe, or there again - maybe not. I would say the side edges of the OldCarpet.com signature cartouche impinge upon the dark blue leaves of the flanking arabesque repeat, rather than being integrated with the pattern as the Sobhe test requires. The signature section may not be so unthinkingly dumped upon the surrounding pattern as in the OrientalRug illustration, but neither does it seem (to me) to be organically developed from the ‘background’ design.

The Sobhe Test remains an interesting theory, to be checked against future occurences of the much-abused Habibian signature.

[1] Davari is mentioned as an Isfahan ustad (masterweaver) together with Dardashti on an interesting German ustad listing at akorug:

Hofmanufakturen und Meisterknüpfer, wie Habibian, Drakhshesh, Mohamadi aus Nain, Hadji Djalili aus Täbris, Mohtasham aus Keshan, Amogli aus Mashad, Serafian, Davari, Dardashdi aus Isfahan und Mirmehdi, Kohlar, Nouri, Kamal aus Ghoum, sie alle haben Kunstwerke geschaffen, die ein Menschenleben überdauern. Ihre Namen stehen geleichbedeutend mit den Namen berühmter Maler wie Rembrandt, Michelangelo oder Van Gogh. Kunstwerke dieser Meisterknüpfer finden Sie in unserer

Our Rug Fanatics discussion group is still going strong - founded Christmas 1998 and now 3900 messages and 624 members later one of the only two viable places on the web where Oriental carpets are consistently treated with positive respect. (The other is Barry O’Connell’s OrientalRug group).

Anyway, if not already a member, you can use this form to sign up now. Its free and you certainly won’t regret it.

Welcome to World Rugs. This is the first post. Soon, I’ll delete it, and then start getting serious! It took a while, (hours and hours on a wet London Sunday), after the AMAZING 5 MINUTE INSTALL for this Wordpress platform, to do the wee tweaks that is the burden of the Site Admin, but now it seems to start happening. Well, at least there’s a page, with words on it, and such like. Content! Although not a lot of form.