© The Author [2016]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Design History Society. All rights reserved.
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Persian Carpets and the South Kensington Museum: Design, Scholarship and Collecting in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain
Cailah Jackson
This article analyzes one aspect of the early historiography of Middle Eastern carpets: namely, how carpets from Persia were acquired, studied and presented in the context of late nineteenth-century British responses to the Orient and industrialization both in Europe and Persia. The discussion centres on the scholarly output and the collecting activities of the South Kensington Museum (now the Victoria and Albert Museum)—an institution that emerged within a landscape of orientalism, capitalist-imperialism, design reform and exhibitionary spectacle. By examining the works of key figures connected to the museum, such as Owen Jones, George Birdwood, Robert Murdoch Smith and William Morris, the present study discusses how the Victorian art establishment shaped discussions on taste, authenticity, taxonomy and commodification. It argues that such activities have helped to entrench a hierarchical and evolutionary understanding of ‘Oriental’ carpets that privileges imperial Safavid specimens over market-led Qajar and machine-made British examples.
Keywords: Textile design and manufacture—South Kensington Museum—orientalism—Design Reform Movement–Arts and Crafts movement—Islamic art
IntroductionThe South Kensington Museum was founded in 1852, as a result of concerns over the quality of the British industrial design that had been on display during the Great Exhibition of 1851. The museum’s collection and scholarly activities were shaped by an intellectual climate that was itself defined in part by the British colonial project and a broader fascination with the peoples, histories and cultures of regions beyond western Europe. From the second half of the nineteenth century, the interest in Middle Eastern and Asian art and culture also formed part of a wider movement towards historical styles in art and architecture (such as the Gothic Revival), as those who were dissatisfied with industrialization and capitalism searched for premodern ideals in romanticized notions of an authentic and traditional East.
One aspect of the intersection that occurred in Victorian Britain between design, schol-arship, imperialism, commercialism, and the museum is the focus of this article: namely, how Persian carpets were acquired, studied and presented within the framework of the scholarly and collecting activities of the South Kensington Museum, an institution that, as I hope I shall demonstrate, encapsulated the contemporary convergence between empire, industry, museum discourse and orientalism.
Until the publication of Edward Said’s watershed work, Orientalism, in 1978, an ‘ori-entalist’ was a scholar of the Middle East, North Africa, Central Asia, South Asia, East
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Asia or Southeast Asia. ‘Orientalism’ also defined a category of painting that was not unified by style or technique but by the depiction of (often imagined) scenes of Eastern life and legend. However, after the publication of Said’s work, which has generated its own extensive corpus of scholarship, the terms ‘orientalism’ and ‘the Orient’ were forever imbued with connotations of European imperialism and the subordination and essentialization of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures.
The British fascination with the Orient in the second half of the nineteenth century is one facet of a vast and nuanced phenomenon that encompassed Europe and North America, yet it still cannot be easily summarized in a few sentences. The Orient in the Victorian British imagination was made manifest in myriad and variable contexts, across painting, literature, music, theatre, architecture, advertising and interior design.1 Within these, the arts, cultures and peoples of Turkey, the Arab world, Iran, India, China, Japan, and other regions were appropriated, re-interpreted and consumed in innumerable ways.2
Islamic patterns and motifs—lifted from the architecture, ceramics, textiles, metalwork and manuscripts belonging to diverse geographical and chronological contexts—were, generally speaking, admired and promoted by members of the design reform (1830s–1870s) and Arts and Crafts (1880s–1910s) movements in Britain.3 Many lead-ing figures in these movements were also closely tied to the collecting and scholarly pursuits of the South Kensington Museum. The admiration shown by some towards Islamic design was not limited to carpets and there were similar passions for Islamic ceramics and architecture in particular.4 In this setting, carpets from the East were lauded as ideal aesthetic specimens. However, as attitudes towards industrialization and commercialism became increasingly negative, the focus of art establishment fig-ures turned towards sixteenth- and seventeenth-century carpets produced during the reign of the Safavid dynasty who between 1501 and 1736 ruled an area that now encompasses Iran and parts of Iraq, Turkey, the Caucasus, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan. As the result of this preference for historical specimens, museum asso-ciates privileged elitist connoisseurial aspirations and apparently authentic, antique, handmade objects over modern, market-led examples.
In recent years, there has been a renewed scholarly focus on the reception and study of Middle Eastern and Indian carpets in Europe and North America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.5 While this development is part of a wider emphasis on scru-tinizing the early development of Islamic art as a field, the focus on such carpets is also a reaction to continued deficiencies in the state of Oriental carpet studies. One noteworthy deficiency is the continued lack of standardized conventions concerning carpet terminology. Although the term ‘Oriental’ is now largely obsolete in the art his-tory of Middle East and Asia, it is an accepted term in carpet scholarship and reflects the field’s problematic state. I employ the term ‘Oriental’ throughout this article as it reflects nineteenth-century usage, and because no commonly accepted alternative has yet emerged.6 The terms ‘Iran/Iranian’ and ‘Persia/Persian’ are also used interchange-ably in carpet studies.7 I opt for the latter terms as they better reflect nineteenth-cen-tury usage, and more clearly evoke the concept of the ‘Persian carpet’ as a collectable object imbued with aesthetic, historical and commercial value-judgments.
In focusing on the British contribution to early Oriental carpet scholarship, this article complements recent work that discusses German and American activities.8 It also brings together and expands upon scholarship that has addressed nineteenth-century carpet collecting and production, and considered the orientalist facet of western museology and art history.9 As such, I analyze the essays and letters of curators, museum advisors,
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agents, dealers and collectors that have not previously been examined in this scholarly context. To begin with, I discuss what role Middle Eastern carpets played in the design reform movement that emerged in the 1850s, before assessing the museum’s response to the British commercial presence in the Persian carpet industry during the reign of the Qajar dynasty, who between 1789 and 1925 ruled an area that roughly corresponds to modern-day Iran. The article ends with an exploration of Persian carpets in the Arts and Crafts movement, and the emerging passion for Safavid carpets in both scholar-ship and the art market.
‘You cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers’:10 The design reform movement and ‘tasteful’ carpetsSome studies of Middle Eastern carpet history have questioned why there was a ‘boom’ in the production of Persian carpets in the late nineteenth century, and whether this increased production even constituted a ‘boom’.11 A fuller consideration of this issue is beyond the scope of this paper but the evidence cited in the existing literature suggests a growing European trade in Persian carpets from the 1870s onwards.12 This growth, which appears to have been due to increasing western demands, was supported by both European and Persian commercial interests.
The British fascination with Oriental carpets, however, can be traced to the preceding decades, commencing with displays of Middle Eastern art in the Great Exhibition of 1851. The exhibition was a watershed in Victorian society, creating a climate in which nationalism and imperialism, technology and industrialization, the free market, and art were woven together.13 As Thomas Richards has stated, the spectacle of the exhibition offered visual metaphors for British cultural and political superiority, and posited an idealized relationship between commodity production and territorial expansion,14 and between the Empire and its Others.
Despite the extravaganza of industry and ethnography, British design was criticized as being disappointingly bereft of principles. Owen Jones complained that there was ‘novelty without beauty’ throughout.15 Though British carpets apparently displayed ‘exceeding taste and judgment’ in some critics’ eyes,16 Middle Eastern carpets were soon presented by leading design reform figures as ideal specimens of what floor cover-ings should be. In 1852, the Museum of Manufactures—soon renamed the Museum of Ornamental Art in 1853—was established under the directorship of Henry Cole (1808–82). Nine British carpets that had been on show during the Great Exhibition were put on display in a gallery that was mockingly called the ‘Chamber of Horrors’, perhaps initially by Charles Dickens.17 The nine carpets displayed were lambasted by the reformers for imitative floral and architectural designs,18 despite the persisting popular-ity of naturalistic flower patterns in middle-class homes.19 The gallery, in reality named ‘Examples of False Principles in the Decoration’, played an important role in establishing the aesthetic bases of the design reform movement. The principles of design reform, largely formulated by Henry Cole, Richard Redgrave (1804–88), Owen Jones (1809–74), and Augustus Pugin (1812–52), drew on the enthusiasm for Islamic patterns and motifs. Pugin’s view that carpets and textiles should, above all, express ‘flatness’ had particular impact.20 These ‘False Principles’, however, were subjected to the same kind of ridicule as that directed at the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ for their pretension and detachment from the reality of middle-class consumption. In Dickens’ Hard Times (1854), a caricature of a government official claims that ‘you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in carpets […] This is the new discovery. This is fact. This is taste’.21
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The gallery also set a precedent by attempting to control consumption and industrial design through display and discourse, and by imbuing art appreciation and museum visitation with a moral element. Henry Cole himself claimed that museums ‘furnish a powerful antidote to the gin palace’.22 In the period after the Great Exhibition, muse-ums not only embodied the apparent cultural and technological superiority of the empire but also became spaces for the acquisition of secular truth and cultural capital, and the demonstration of superior education, class distinction and the possession of good taste.23 The procurement of good taste was further encouraged through the purchase of objects from fashionable department stores like Liberty and Co, Maple and Co and Whiteleys. The consumption of such pieces served to further emphasize the relationship advanced by the Great Exhibition, and the activities of the design reformers themselves, between display, design, and cultural and economic progress.24
Integral to this landscape of capitalist-imperialism were concepts of race, taxonomy and display. Racial hierarchies that posited the west as sophisticated and advanced, and classified the Rest into discrete, static, traditional societies spread to the common cul-tural consciousness and were reinforced through popular culture.25 The ‘exhibitionary complex’, which pedagogically promoted state and industry through a convergence of (pseudo-)anthropology, display, and entertainment, purportedly displayed the evidence for these imagined societies.26 Such conceptions were underpinned by systems of clas-sification that had been inspired by contemporary developments in palaeontology and zoology.27
For the nation and the museum, material culture was the objective evidence of achieve-ment and identity.28 The decontextualization, re-interpretation and preservation of what were deemed by curators to be culturally significant art objects, created a scale that divided the world’s population in relation to their possession of art (sophistication and creativity) or culture (enduring tradition). James Clifford has outlined this process in his pioneering work, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, in a diagram entitled ‘The Art-Culture System: a machine for-making authenticity’.29 Expanding upon the example of Fredric Jameson’s ‘semiotic square’,30 Clifford illuminates the hierarchies that are created between objects depend-ing on their ascribed cultural or commercial values within the context of the western art sphere. Art historical discourse, therefore, promoted the development of ‘rise-and-fall’ narratives,31 which allowed dominant social classes to vindicate and naturalize their prejudices through the taxonomical ‘art-culture’ system.32 Through the selection and classification of objects, the act of collecting advanced these value-laden and taxo-nomic structures by exhibiting and normalizing such hierarchies.33
Despite the South Kensington Museum’s educative intentions, it could not realistically escape the imperial zeitgeist and demand for exhibitionary spectacle. The museum, which had opened in its new form in 1857, was criticized by an anonymous Saturday Review writer for foregoing its didactic aims and becoming as informative as ‘a lei-surely survey of the London shop-windows’.34 Tim Barringer has discussed how all of the museums in ‘Albertopolis’35 merged education and entertainment in the display of taxonomic authority over science, art and the peoples of the British Empire.36 The South Kensington Museum, in addition to participating in events like the 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition, resembled a ‘three-dimensional imperial archive’ that attempted to impose hierarchical order over an encyclopaedic field of material culture.37
The Museum’s space and architecture reinforced the engagement with material and cultural hierarchies. The East Cloister, reserved for Indian, East Asian, and Middle Eastern objects illustrated contrived racial taxonomies that were ‘assigned a marginal
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and subordinate, and yet essential role […] within the “universal” Western canon’.38 The proposed decoration of the galleries, in Owen Jones’s favourite Moorish style, obscured geographical diversity and juxtaposed the ‘glorious’ past in the context of the objects’ now-enlightened present in South Kensington.39
Middle Eastern and Asian objects, judged by their possession of ‘authenticity’, were the material evidence of historicized peoples and cultures, whose achievements were rele-gated to the past, and demarcated from the progressive trajectory of Europe and North America.40 Susan Pearce has discussed how the concept of authenticity has become inseparable from concepts of ‘naturalness’, craftsmanship, faithfulness to tradition, and a kind of ‘durable goodness’.41 Such connotations were crucial in the develop-ment of Oriental carpet discourse over the course of the later nineteenth century.42 As the cultures of the Middle East and Asia were historicized and romanticized, their present-day inhabitants were paradoxically denigrated according to how far their ideal-ized traditional societies had been contaminated by contemporary European contact. Oriental arts were both pure and corrupted, simultaneously marginalized and used as models for British design. Such contradictions and nuances were integral to how Oriental carpets were later classified and stratified, according to Eurocentric criteria of age and imperial association.
Owen Jones—a crucial figure in the design reform movement—was a particularly passionate advocate of ‘Moresque’ design, and Islamic pattern more generally. Jones indisputably operated within the prevailing princi-ples of cultural evolutionism and industrial progress, yet profoundly reshaped views of Middle Eastern and Asian design,43 believing that Islamic art in particular offered the best opportunity for unified and rational design principles. Jones’s 1856 publication, The Grammar of Ornament,44 not only put forward this view but also effectively used display and discourse to implement and disseminate the distillation and classification of ‘traditional’ (i.e. historicized) non-western design. The Grammar of Ornament, which was the first significant attempt in western art history to categorize and publish worldwide decorative forms, reinforced the relationship between geographical provenance and artistic achieve-ment. By decontextualizing and condensing visual forms into consumable fragments, complex forms of decora-tion were removed from their historical contexts and rei-fied as ageless symbols of their respective cultures [1].
Stacey Sloboda has argued, however, that by juxtaposing ornamentation from diverse worldwide sources, many of which were probably very unfamiliar to readers, The Grammar both reinforced and subverted imperial ideol-ogy.45 Indeed, Islamic patterns and motifs constituted twenty-four of the work’s one hundred chromolitho-graphs, and had a clear impact on Jones’s universal design propositions. This is evident in the extensive chapter on ‘Moorish’ design, in which Jones thoroughly
recounts his aesthetic principles in relation to Spanish Islamic architecture. In his advocacy of the abstract and chromatic properties of Islamic patterns, Jones, alongside Pugin and
Fig 1. Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament, 1856, Persian Ornament, plate XLV, no. 2
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others, helped to encourage a move away from falsely-principled floral carpet designs. This became evident in the years following the emergence of the reform movement, as consumers and manufacturers took note of the discussion on taste and non-naturalistic styles.46
Beyond the pedagogical museum context, the taste discourse was disseminated through publications like The Grammar of Ornament, and other popular decorating guidebooks.47 These design guides underlined how aesthetic criteria for carpets were increasingly linked to Middle Eastern designs. Charles Locke Eastlake, writing in 1868, stated that Oriental carpets would ‘afford you more lasting eye-pleasure than any English imitation’.48 For Eastlake, British carpet design was still awash with ‘pictorial monstrosities’, due in part to their appeal to the ‘uneducated eye’.49 George Wallis, writing a few years later in 1871, declared that, ‘thanks to the incessant iteration of a few simple rules and conditions’, British-made carpet manufacturers had begun to employ Islamic-inspired design principles [2].50
Despite Owen Jones’s efforts to promote the art of Muslim Spain, Persia came to domi-nate nineteenth-century conceptions of Islamic art and culture. While Persia was not necessarily the most prominent ‘Oriental’ region in the popular British imagination (particularly in comparison to India), it certainly occupied a privileged position in more scholarly understandings of Oriental history. Nineteenth-century developments in the biological sciences and linguistics had prompted the emergence of pseudo-Darwinist theories concerning cultural evolutionism. Writers like Arthur de Gobineau (1816–82) applied linguistic theories regarding Indo-European languages to ideas of race. De Gobineau claimed in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races (1853–5) that the white European ‘race’—who had supposedly invented civilization—could be traced back to Aryan roots.51 The permeation of such theories into the wider consciousness resulted in the emergence of a simplistic hierarchy in which Persians were deemed superior to ‘Semites’ (Arab peoples) and ‘Turanians’ (Turkic peoples).
This framework, which privileged the classical heritage of art and architecture, is vis-ible throughout nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writings on Islamic art and architecture.52 In the preface to Vincent Robinson’s Eastern Carpets (1882), George Birdwood (1832–1917) wrote that while most Middle Eastern art had not changed much through the ages, the ‘Graeco-Sassanid’ character of Aryan art had been ‘confused and perverted’ by ‘barbarian’ Saracens (an antiquated word for Arabs or
Fig 2. An Axminster carpet manufactured by John Brinton and Co., 1871. G. Wallis, The International Exhibition, 1871 (London: Virtue & Co, 1871), 48
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Muslims).53 Birdwood also noted that ‘flawless’ floral patterns prevailed in Aryan lands, contrasting with crude Turanian geometrical patterns that were unable to give ‘floral patterns [...] their true forms’.54 Beyond the realm of carpets, works produced in Egypt, the Levant or Turkey were sometimes assumed to be ‘Persian’, or even European.55
In contrast to the enthusiasm directed towards historical Persian art and culture, a level of disdain was exhibited by scholars towards the present-day inhabitants of the region. In order to reconcile the notion of Aryan descent with the realities of contemporary Persia, a distinction was made in art historical discourse between the ‘noble Persians of old and their “diluted” progeny’.56 Indeed, Arthur Upham Pope (1881–1969), one of the best-known early scholars of Islamic art, once stated that the art of the Qajars, who ruled Persia from 1789 to 1925, was ‘grotesque and stupid’, while the Qajars themselves ‘know nothing and cared nothing for Persia’s great tradition in the arts’.57 The preference for all things Persian was also evident outside of the field of Islamic art history. In his 1873 design guidebook, Christopher Dresser remarked that ‘I know of no ornament more intricately beautiful and mingled than the Persian’, which were ‘models of what carpets should be’.58
By appropriating the dominant cultural discourse, which evaluated Persian creativity in terms of a pre-Islamic (or, in Birdwood’s terms, ‘Graeco-Sassanid’) aesthetic, the design establish-ment reified the historicity of Middle Eastern cultures, and their present-day artistic and social degeneration. The perception of Persia as historically noble and traditional yet also contemporarily decaying and archaic was instrumental in shaping the ensuing discourse on carpets, which privileged antique Safavid specimens over ‘tribal’ and ‘modern’ examples.
Imperial designs: British exploits in Qajar PersiaWith the retirement of Henry Cole as director of the South Kensington Museum in 1873, the museum’s focus shifted away from the reform of British design to the apparent ‘deterioration’ of contemporary Middle Eastern design.59 The concern over Europeanizing effects—in terms of decoration and in the use of chemical dyes—resulted in a renewed emphasis on collecting, aided by the museum’s agent in Persia, Robert Murdoch Smith (1835–1900).60 This shift in the museum’s focus also coincided with increasing British intervention in the Persian carpet industry.61 Such activities occurred in order to both meet British consumer demands for carpets, and to confront the rival commercial ventures of Russia and Germany.62
The re-establishment of the Qajar carpet industry has been studied in some detail, so will be briefly summarized here.63 Until the 1870s, carpet production and trade in Persia was maintained by court notables, provincial officials, local khans and loom owners.64 The bazaar-centred production network linked village and nomadic produc-tion with several urban centres like Kirman, Isfahan and Mashhad. Although there is no quantitative data concerning trade before the 1860s, written sources claim that pro-duction during this period—well before European involvement—was highly specialized and geared towards both domestic and international markets.65 The further growth of exports and national commercial networks, however, was ultimately hindered by politi-cal instability in the region, exacerbated by the difficulties of physical geography and events like the Anglo-Persian War of 1856–7.66
As a result of growing European interest in Middle Eastern carpets, fuelled by world fairs and the ensuing discourse on art and design, the Persian carpet industry swiftly expanded in the 1870s.67 The draw of near-guaranteed profits and a lack of formal bank-ing and credit structures attracted foreign firms, like the Manchester-based Anglo-Swiss
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firm, Ziegler and Co.68 Established in 1867, Ziegler and Co is the earliest known foreign enterprise to have directly participated in the investment and consolidation of the Persian carpet industry. Through their purchase of a factory in Sultanabad (now known as Arak) in 1881, Ziegler and Co helped to organize and standardize the mass manufacture of carpets, as well as rapidly expanding local industry by providing models of production.69 In 1870, there were around forty looms in operation in Sultanabad. By the 1880s, a few thousand looms were in operation in and around the town,70 with Ziegler’s supplying about four thousand carpets every year to Europe in the late nineteenth century.71
The responses of South Kensington Museum curators and advisors to Ziegler carpets were not uniform, and reflected the conflict between the aims of design reform and the increasingly negative attitudes towards industrialization and commercialism. Caspar Purdon Clarke (1846–1911), the South Kensington Museum’s director between 1896 and 1905, and their agent in India in the 1880s, praised Ziegler and Co for rectifying ‘confusing’ Persian attempts at updating and reviving historical designs.72 By produc-ing designs that extracted and reinterpreted ‘medallion and corner’ patterns, Ziegler carpets adhered to the guidelines set out in household design manuals, while satisfying European tastes and desires for ‘authentic’ Persian objects.
Conversely, George Birdwood, who was the Art Referee for South Kensington’s Indian Department, was highly disapproving of English ‘interference’ in the Persian carpet indus-try.73 Birdwood criticized the ‘cheapening effects’ of Europeanization on the aesthetics of Persian carpets, declaring that such products merely served to indulge the ‘vulgarity’ of the middle classes.74 The evident elitism in such sentiments was disparaged in the contemporary press. A correspondent for the London Morning Post commented in 1902 that the phrase ‘made for the market’ is ‘constantly used as a token of disparagement when speaking of modern work, and especially of the Sultanabad products, just as if ninety-nine out of every hundred carpets had not always been “made for the market”‘.75
As far as I can ascertain, no Ziegler-made carpets were purchased by the South Kensington Museum.76 The types of carpets acquired by the museum in the 1880s and the 1890s in fact suggest that collecting objectives were shaped by concerns over corrupting European influence rather than desires to improve British industrial design (not that the two objectives were mutually exclusive). As I shall discuss, such acquisi-tions were increasingly ‘antique’ and handmade. Robert Murdoch Smith, the museum’s agent in Persia between 1873–85, was instrumental in forming the museum’s collec-tion of Oriental carpets in the late nineteenth century. Having resided in Tehran for twenty years as the director of the Persian section of the Indo-European Telegraph Department, a branch of the British Government in India, Smith was well placed to access dealers and markets. Smith’s questionable collecting strategies appear to have centred on religious institutions and local bazaars. Tomoko Masuya has outlined how Smith exploited inconsistent regulations in order to purchase Ilkhanid tiles that had been surreptitiously removed from religious monuments.77 Masuya states that the provenance of said tiles was mostly likely falsified in order to obscure their true ori-gins.78 In letters to the museum written in 1875, Smith cautioned that ‘the attention of the Mollahs has already been drawn’ to the missing tiles, and complained that ‘reli-gious prejudice’ had prevented the easy purchase of such items.79
In a catalogue of 1876 compiled by Smith that described the museum’s Persian collection, he discussed the contemporary inhabitants of Persia, stating that ‘the beauties of their art, as of their [...] character, lie on the surface, while the defect of both are carefully con-cealed by a pleasing lacquer of polished refinement’.80 The local Turkic population also came in for criticism, with Smith demonstrating surprise that the ‘rich’ carpet on display
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could be ‘woven in the tents of a wild and nomadic race like the Turcomans’.81 Works of art, Smith claimed, ‘are almost exclusively confined to the parts of the country inhabited by the old Aryan stock’,82 thereby conforming to racial hierarchies as formulated by de Gobineau and elaborated upon by Islamic art scholars such as Arthur Upham Pope. The catalogue was referenced in an anonymous review of the galleries which agreed with Smith’s negative assessments of Arab and Turkic art, and emphasized that ‘the more ancient the specimens […] the finer they are in design and execution’.83
The prioritization of Persian art resulted in the classification of the majority of the muse-um’s carpets as ‘Persian’.84 One of the carpets which was incorrectly assumed to be Persian turned out to be a product of sixteenth-century Ottoman Cairo.85 The tendency to group such objects under categories constructed by western discourse remains a problem in the study of Oriental carpets. Although classificatory terms continue to pose challenges in many areas of Islamic art scholarship, the continued use of Eurocentric terminology in carpet scholarship, such as ‘Polonaise’, or ‘Holbein’, reflects the com-parative lack of scholarly engagement with carpet historiography and the concurrent close involvement of the market and connoisseurs in the evaluation of such material.86
Collectors and connoisseurs: The passion for Safavid carpetsWhile the concern over false principles persisted throughout the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the museum’s scholarly and collecting aims were increasingly shaped by interests in pre-industrial craftsmanship and objects produced in non-com-mercial and imperial Safavid contexts. This move away from the reformation of indus-trial design was prompted by the Arts and Crafts movement which emphasized natural materials and artisanal crafts. The movement, in effect led by the designer, writer and self-proclaimed socialist, William Morris (1834–96), became especially prominent in the British design landscape from the 1880s onwards.
An Art Referee for the South Kensington Museum from 1884, Morris was integral to the growing enthusiasm for Safavid carpets among the art establishment. Morris deemed such objects to be more authentic representations of a cohesive non-commer-cial and ‘imperial’ aesthetic in comparison to Qajar carpets.87 In an 1877 letter to the silk producer, Thomas Wardle, Morris wrote that, ‘I saw yesterday a piece of ancient Persian time of Shah Abbas […] I had no idea that such wonders could be done with carpets’.88 Morris was himself a collector of Islamic art, and one of his Safavid carpets was acquired by the South Kensington Museum soon after his death.89 While Morris adhered to the notion that carpet designs should be ‘flat’, he also put a large degree of emphasis on the importance of hand-weaving, distinguishing between ‘real art’ and ‘makeshift goods woven purely mechanically’.90 This partiality aroused objections from a manufacturer of machine-made carpets, who complained that ‘filthy’ antique carpets were ‘preferred […] because Mr. Morris and some other upholstering poets had sung their praises’.91
The museum acquired its first Safavid carpets in 1883, filling what Morris termed ‘a very serious deficiency’ in the collection.92 While European carpet collectors and scholars had been aware of the existence of Safavid pieces since the 1870s (Wilhelm von Bode remarked that ‘In Italy […] they lay practically in the streets’), early transactions were con-cealed to avoid ‘spoiling the market’.93 This deliberate suppression essentially fetishized a group of carpets that conformed to connoisseurs’ demands for antiquity, authentic-ity, and aesthetic complexity. After the groundbreaking 1891 Vienna Carpet Exhibition, however, in which von Bode complained that ‘unimportant modern pieces hung next to
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magnificent old carpets’, the existence of antique carpets became well-known to wealthy collectors, stimulating the acquisition and appraisal of such material.94
Older carpets were ostensibly collected by the museum to showcase examples of good design. As Morris wrote, Safavid carpets demonstrated ‘carpet weaving at its best’.95 However, the wider enthusiasm for craftsmanship and historicity, and the unprece-dented amounts of money spent on such carpets, suggests their antique and imperial connotations in particular were valued very highly. This was epitomized in the purchase of the Ardabil Carpet from Vincent Robinson and Co in 1893.96 Produced in 1539–40, the carpet and its matching copy were apparently commissioned by Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1514–76) for the Shaykh Safi al-Din shrine complex in Ardabil. Martin Weaver, how-ever, has argued that no room in the shrine is large enough to contain both carpets (even if stacked), stating that a 1795 shrine inventory lists no such objects.97 Regardless of their true origin, they remain the oldest dated carpets in the world.
Sold initially in 1888 to Ziegler and Co—in order to pay for repairs in the Ardabil shrine, according to Kurt Erdmann—the carpets arrived at the dealership of Vincent Robinson and Co in December 1891.98 A small handbook entitled ‘The Holy Carpet of the Mosque at Ardebil’, which had been produced by the firm’s managing direc-tor, Edward Stebbing, accompanied a two-week exhibition at their Wigmore Street gallery.99 Before being displayed, the carpet which would eventually be bought by the South Kensington Museum was repaired, probably with sections removed from its twin.100 The existence of this smaller matching carpet, now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, was suppressed until 1910.101
The carpet’s design, workmanship, immense size, and romantic royal and religious con-notations, incited widespread fascination in the British press. The Manchester Guardian stated that the carpet was ‘the finest […] known to modern times’ and that it ‘entirely beggars description’.102 The Times called it ‘probably without any exaggeration […] the finest Persian carpet in the world’.103 William Morris later remarked that it was ‘the finest Eastern carpet’ he had ever seen and that it represented ‘the excellence of the palmy days of Persian design’.104 Though the asking price of £2,500 (nearly £250,000 today) was unequalled at the time,105 the museum eventually raised the funds by March 1893, aided by the campaigning of the prolific collector and museum curator, Augustus Wollaston Franks (1826–97) and Morris himself.106
The Ardabil Carpet helped to cement a scholarly and commercial hierarchy in which supposedly ‘holy’ and imperial antiques came to represent the apex of Persian carpet production. The religious element attached to such objects, however, was incongruous and meaningless. While carpets may have been used in mosques, shrines or lodges, there is no evidence that they were ever considered sacred by their weavers or owners. Furthermore, a closer look at Safavid carpet production challenges the late nineteenth-century conception of the courtly carpet, untainted by commercialism. The Safavid period saw the integration of nomadic and rural carpet production into a national network of manufacture and trade, particularly during the reigns of Shah Tahmasp I (r. 1514–76) and Shah Abbas I (r. 1588–1629). This consolidation entailed the establishment of carpet factories in major urban centres, and the export of carpets to South and Southeast Asia, the Ottoman Empire and parts of Europe. International trade in this period was facili-tated by local Armenian merchants and the emergence of European trading companies. According to the writings of the French traveller, Jean Chardin (1643–1713), there were thirty-two royal workshops across Safavid territories, each employing around 150 people (around 4,800 people in total).107 However, such workshops were not strictly ‘royal’, and produced carpets as diplomatic gifts, private commissions and for the export trade.108
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It is impossible to quantify the carpet trade within and beyond Persia in the Safavid period due to an absence of data. Nevertheless, the consciously commercial organiza-tion and expansion of carpet production contradicts later nineteenth-century visions of a supposedly historical, courtly and artisanal Persian carpet. Indeed, not all carpet pro-duction in Qajar Persia was necessarily commercial, and could have equally ‘imperial’ associations. In 1876, for example, the Qajar ruler Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96) him-self gifted seven woollen carpets to the South Kensington Museum.109 Ironically, the purchase and reception of the Ardabil Carpet underlines how the South Kensington Museum’s discourse on taste, authenticity and craftsmanship was in fact closely related to the British commercial presence in Persia and the art market. Though the British industrial presence in Qajar carpet production was decried by some museum officials, works like the Ardabil Carpet would probably otherwise have never made their way to Britain.
Safavid carpets are still considered by some scholars to be the ‘high point’ of Persian carpet design and production.110 Whether this is the case or not is difficult to say for certain since a relative lack of engagement with historiographical frameworks and problematic terminology has resulted in an underdeveloped body of literature and a comparatively small number of scholars, despite the efforts of a few individuals.111 Walter Denny attributes this state of affairs to the close relationship between scholar-ship and the art market.112 This connection, which does not exist for other aspects of Islamic art, has also, as Denny claims, resulted in a field developed by ‘individuals who frequently lack the requisite methodological and linguistic competence’.113
The present shape of carpet studies can in part be traced back to the emergence of Islamic art history in a nineteenth-century context where orientalism, imperialism, com-mercialism and armchair enthusiasm intersected.114 Despite the substantial contribu-tions they may have made to Oriental carpet studies, none of the designers, curators, collectors and dealers discussed above had any formal training in art historical meth-ods or in the analysis of primary Persian, Arabic or Turkish sources. More often than not, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century forays into the scholarship of ‘Oriental’ cultures were conducted by a diverse range of individuals who moved from discipline to discipline.115 Although attempts were made in the early decades of the twentieth century to evaluate carpets along more scholarly bases (particularly in Germany), the study of carpet history remains largely outside of the mainstream academic discourse of Islamic art.116 With some exceptions, English-language carpet scholarship is largely published in Hali magazine, the self-described ‘glue that holds the international rug and textile market together’.117
ConclusionBy the early decades of the twentieth century, the enthusiasm for Persian and particu-larly Safavid carpets was well established. In a 1915 Victoria and Albert Museum guide-book, the Keeper of the Textiles Department, Albert F. Kendrick (1872–1954), wrote that Safavid carpets, which dominated the gallery display at the time, were examples of ‘incontestable accomplishments in finish and elaboration of design’.118 In the ensu-ing years, sixteenth-century Persian carpets were selling in New York for $2,000–5,000 each (roughly $27,000–83,000 today).119
The continued interest in Persian carpets in the early twentieth century was also evident in more academic ventures. Arthur Upham Pope’s 1925 article, ‘Research Methods in Muhammadan Art’ attempted to place carpets in the broader field of Islamic art and
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go beyond aesthetic judgments.120 However, the underlying hierarchy was made clear by Pope when he remarked that ‘the drift of rug design has been steadily from the East to the West, and those who hold that Persian rugs owe anything to the designs of Asia Minor must show the unmistakeable priority of the latter’.121
As an institution that had emerged at the crossroads of orientalism, colonialism, display and design reform, the South Kensington Museum was instrumental in guiding per-ceptions of Oriental carpets, at the levels of both scholarship and commerce. Middle Eastern visual culture was admired for its treatment of geometry and floral motifs, and promoted by British designers, and the ‘Persian carpet’, broadly speaking, became an emblem of sophistication, luxury and taste.122 However, as the art establishment’s increasingly elitist focus shifted away from industry and middle-class consumption, curators, dealers and connoisseurs constructed a hierarchy of Persian carpets that was based on the supposedly immutable concept of ‘authenticity’. Such a hierarchy prior-itized antique and largely unattainable objects, and catered to an increasingly rarefied facet of the art market. Recontextualized and reinterpreted in the homes, commercial galleries and museums of Victorian Britain, the Oriental carpet became—and remains—a reflection of the desires of its consumers, and a synthesis of real and imagined histo-ries and cultures.
Cailah JacksonDPhil student, University of OxfordE-mail: [email protected]
Cailah Jackson is a fourth-year DPhil student based at the Khalili Research Centre (part of the Oriental Institute) at the University of Oxford. She holds the Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani Graduate Scholarship. Cailah’s thesis concerns the production and patronage of illuminated Islamic manuscripts in late medieval Anatolia (1270s-1370s). Her study is based on the codicological examination of around twenty manuscripts, which mainly consist of works by the Sufi poet, Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 1273), and his son, Sultan Walad (d. 1312). The thesis will explore the cultural contexts of illuminated manuscript production in urban centres such as Konya, Istanos, and Sivas, and discuss several patrons, including Seljuk courtiers, Turkmen beys, and an eastern Anatolian Mevlevi amir.
Cailah is also interested in orientalism, Islamic art historiography, the Mongol and Mamluk arts of the book, and artists and Sufi material culture in the early Ottoman period. She has previously completed a MSt in Oriental Studies, also from the University of Oxford, a MA in the History of Art from the School of Oriental and African Studies, and a BSc from the London School of Economics.
If you have any comments to make in relation to this article, please go to the journal website on
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responses to the editorial board and other readers.
Acknowledgements: This article is based on my master’s thesis, which was completed at the School
of Oriental and African Studies in 2009. I am grateful to Anna Contadini and Stacey Pierson for
helping me to develop my knowledge of Islamic art historiography, museums and orientalism during
my year of study there. Sincere thanks must go to Duraid Jalili and Moya Carey for their help and
encouragement during the earlier stages of drafting this article, and the four anonymous reviewers
whose comments were both invaluable and insightful.
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Notes 1 For a thorough overview of orientalism in the arts, see John
M. MacKenzie, Orientalism: History, Theory and the Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press,1995. On paint-ing specifically, see Nicholas Tromans, ed., The Lure of the East: British Orientalist Painting. London: Tate Publishing, 2008.
2 On attitudes towards Japanese, Chinese and Indian art in Britain, see, for example, Elizabeth H. Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010; Joe Earle, ‘The Taxonomic Obsession: British Collectors and Japanese Objects, 1852–1986’, The Burlington Magazine 128 (1986): 864–873; Partha Mitter, Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977; Ayako Ono, Japonisme in Britain: Whistler, Menpes, Henry, Hornel and nineteenth-century Japan. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003; Catherine Pagani, ‘Chinese material culture and British perceptions of China in the mid-nineteenth cen-tury’, in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture, and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn. London and New York: Routledge, 1998.
3 It should be noted that ‘Islamic’ is used throughout this article to refer to the art and architecture of North Africa, Islamized Spain and Sicily, Turkey, the Middle East, Iran, Central Asia and northern India from c. 600 to 1900. While this is the generally accepted academic scope of ‘Islamic art’, the problematic nature of the terminology and pur-view of the field is an acknowledged problem. See Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, ‘The Mirage of Islamic Art: Reflections on the Study of an Unwieldy Field’, The Art Bulletin, 85, no. 1 (2003): 152–184.
4 Francesca Vanke, ‘British Cultural and Aesthetic Relationships with the Decorative Arts of the Islamic Orient, with special reference to Ceramics, 1851–1914’ (PhD diss., Camberwell College of Arts, 1998); John Sweetman, The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture, 1500–1920. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
5 Yuka Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope and his “research meth-ods in Muhammadan art”: Persian carpets’, Journal of Art Historiography 6 (2012), accessed 10 November 2015, http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/kadoi.pdf; Yuka Kadoi, ‘A Loan Exhibition of Early Oriental Carpets, Chicago 1926’, in The shaping of Persian art: col-lections and interpretations of the art of Islamic Iran and Central Asia ed., Yuka Kadoi and Iván Szántó (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2013), 254–272; Yumiko Kamada, ‘Flowers on Floats: The Production, Circulation, and Reception of Early Modern Indian Carpets’ (PhD diss., Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 2011);
Hadi Maktabi, ‘Under the Peacock Throne: Carpets, Felts, and Silks in Persian Painting, 1736–1834’, Muqarnas 26, (2009): 317–347; Ayşin Yoltar-Yıldırım, ‘Seljuk Carpets and Julius Harry Löytved-Hardegg: A German consul in Konya in the early 20th century’, in The Thirteenth International Congress of Turkish Art (proceedings), ed. G. Dávid and I. Gerelyes. Budapest: Hungarian National Museum, 2010.
6 Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope’, 1–2, 11. I avoid the rather vague term, ‘Eastern’ which is occasionally used in carpet studies, since it is unclear exactly to which region of the world it refers.
7 See, for example, Ashmolean Museum, Carpets and Textiles in the Iranian World, c. 1400–1700. Oxford: May Beattie Archive and Ashmolean Museum, 2003 and Essie Sakhai, Persian rugs and carpets: the fabric of life. Woodbridge: Antique Collectors’ Club, 2007.
8 See Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope’; Kadoi, ‘A Loan Exhibition’; Yoltar-Yıldırım, op. cit.
9 See, for example, Jennifer Wearden, ‘The Acquisition of Persian and Turkish Carpets by the South Kensington Museum’, in Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, ed. Stephen Vernoit (London: IB Tauris,2000); Jenny Housego, ‘The 19th Century Persian Carpet Boom’, Oriental Art (New Series), 19, no. 2 (1973): 169–171; Annette Ittig, ‘Carpets xi. Qajar Period’, Encyclopædia Iranica, accessed 8 July 2015 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/carpets-xi.
10 Charles Dickens, Hard Times—For These Times. (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854) 10.
11 Housego, op. cit.; Ittig, ‘Carpets xi. Qajar Period’.
12 In addition to works already cited, see Martin Rudner, ‘The Modernization of Iran and the Development of the Persian Carpet Industry: The Neo-Classical Era in the Persian Carpet Industry, 1925–45’, Iranian Studies, 44, no. 1 (2011): 49–76; Roger Savory, ‘Carpets i. Introductory Survey’, Encyclopædia Iranica, accessed 8 July 2015 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/carpets-i.
13 Susan M. Pearce, On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995) 136.
14 Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990) 130.
15 Owen Jones, The Alhambra Court in the Crystal Palace (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1854) 16.
16 The Art Journal, The Crystal Palace Exhibition Illustrated Catalogue (London: Constable, 1970 [1851]) 153.
17 Previous studies on the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ do not discuss where the term originated, though Harry Mallgrave notes that Charles Dickens satirized the galleries in a short story (Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the
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Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996) 213). The story does indeed use the phrase ‘Chamber of Horrors’ (Charles Dickens, ‘A House Full of Horrors’, Household Words 6, no. 141 (1852): 265–270, 265).
18 Barbara Morris, Inspiration for Design: The Influence of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London: V&A Publishing, 1986) 21.
19 Yasuko Suga, ‘Designing the Morality of Consumption: “Chamber of Horrors” at the Museum of Ornamental Art 1852–53’, Design Issues 20, no. 4 (2004): 43–56, 46. See, for example, Victoria and Albert Museum, acc. no. T.10–1933.
20 Mallgrave, op. cit., 201.
21 Dickens, op. cit., 10.
22 Henry Cole, 50 Years of Public Works (London: George Bell and Sons, 1884) 293.
23 Carol Duncan, ‘Art Museums and the Ritual of Citizenship’, in Exhibiting Cultures, ed. Ivan Karp and Steven Levine (Washington DC and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991) 91; Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: a social cri-tique of the judgment of taste, R. Nice, (trans.) Oxford: Polity Press, 1984.
24 Alison Adburgham, ‘The Oriental Bazaar’, in The House of Liberty: Masters of Style and Decoration, ed. Stephen Calloway, London: Thames and Hudson, 1992. It is sig-nificant that many individuals connected to British design reform, and subsequent related movements, such as Henry Cole, Christopher Dresser and William Morris, were all entre-preneurs as well as industrial designers. Cole, for example, had established his own small business, Felix Summerly’s Art-Manufactures, in 1847 before becoming one of the most important public advocates for the improvement of industrial design standards in Victorian Britain.
25 See, for example, Wulf D. Hund, Michael Pickering and Anandi Ramamurthy, eds, Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism. Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2013.
26 Tony Bennett, ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, New Formations 4 (1988): 73–102.
27 Arthur MacGregor, ‘Exhibiting Evolutionism: Darwinism and pseudo-Darwinism in museum practice after 1859’, Journal of the History of Collections 21, no. 1 (2009): 77–94.
28 Sharon Macdonald, ‘Museums, national, postnational and transcultural identities’, Museum and Society 1, no. 1 (2003): 1–16, 3.
29 James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1988) 100.
30 Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981) 47.
31 Robert S. Nelson, ‘The Map of Art History’, The Art Bulletin 79, no. 1 (1997): 28–40; Gülru Necipoğlu, ‘The Concept of Islamic Art: Inherited Discourses and New Approaches’, in Islamic Art and the Museum, ed. Benoit Junod, Georges Khalil, Stefan Weber and Gerhard Wolf. London: Saqi Books, 2012.
32 Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Susan M. Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992) 234.
33 Pearce, Museums, Objects and Collections, 220–221; Pearce, On Collecting, 14–16.
34 Anonymous, Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art 10, no. 250 (1860): 172–173, 173.
35 A name given to the area in South Kensington where sev-eral museums were established, ‘Albertopolis’ referenced the key role Prince Albert had played in the organization of the Great Exhibition. It is unclear where or when the term originated. The earliest reference I have found is from 1860, which notes the ‘wealthy and aristocratic’ nature of the area (Anonymous, ‘The Museum At India House: What Will They Do With It?’, The Observer, 22 April 1860, 5).
36 Tim Barringer, ‘Re-presenting the Imperial Archive: South Kensington and its Museums’, Journal of Victorian Culture 3, no. 2 (2001): 357–373, 370.
37 Tim Barringer, ‘The South Kensington Museum and the Colonial Project’, in Colonialism and the Object: Empire, Material Culture and the Museum, ed. Tim Barringer and Tom Flynn (London: Routledge, 1998) 11.
38 Partha Mitter and C. Clunas, ‘The Empire of Things: Engagement with the Orient’, in A Grand Design: The Art of the Victoria and Albert Museum, ed. M Baker and B Richardson (London: V&A Publications, 1997) 221.
39 Barringer, ‘The South Kensington Museum’, 16.
40 Clifford, op. cit., 222.
41 Pearce, On Collecting, 292. See also Brian Spooner, ‘Weavers and Dealers: The Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
42 A Liberty and Co. catalogue highlights the ‘deft and cunning workmanship, individuality of thought, and centuries of tra-ditional artistic skill’ displayed by Eastern carpets. Liberty and Co, Eastern Carpets (London: Liberty and Co, 1890) 1.
43 Mark Crinson, Empire Building: Orientalism and Victorian Architecture (London, Routledge, 1996) 54–57.
44 Owen Jones, The Grammar of Ornament. London: Day and Son, 1856.
45 Stacey Sloboda, ‘The Grammar of Ornament: Cosmopolitanism and Reform in British Design’, Journal of
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Design History 21, no. 3 (2008): 223–36, 224–225. In mak-ing this claim, Sloboda disagrees with John MacKenzie’s dismissal of The Grammar as a ‘straightforward piece of Victorian taxonomy’. MacKenzie, op. cit., 119.
46 Michael Darby claims that The Grammar almost certainly generated ‘more than one range of ‘Persian’ carpeting’ in Victorian Britain. Michael Darby, The Islamic Perspective: an aspect of British architecture and design in the 19th century (London: Leighton House Gallery, 1983) 122.
47 See, for example, Charles Locke Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste. London: Longman, Greens, and Co, 1869, Christopher Dresser, Principles of Decorative Design. 2nd edn, London and New York: Cassell, Petter and Galpin, 1873.
48 Eastlake, op. cit., 96–97, 103.
49 Ibid., 97–98.
50 George Wallis, The International Exhibition, 1871 (London, Virtue and Co, 1871) 85.
51 Arthur de Gobineau, Gobineau: Selected political writings, ed. Michael D. Biddiss, Adrian Collins, trans. (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970).
52 The notion of cultural evolutionism impacted upon the Victorian art world in varied ways. Despite criticizing Darwin on numerous fronts, the art critic, John Ruskin (1819–1900), believed that architecture was a manifesta-tion of racial characteristics and strongly discouraged ori-ental influences on western building styles, as if the two traditions had always remained discrete (Mark Crinson, Empire Building, 49–61). Such a view was crystallized in Banister Fletcher’s ‘Tree of Architecture’, which quite liter-ally shows an evolving western architectural heritage grow-ing out of classical styles, while the buildings of south and central America, the Middle East and Asia are left stagnat-ing in history. Banister Fletcher, A History of Architecture on the Comparative Method. (London: B. T. Batsford,1905) iii. Conversely, theories of cultural evolutionism also had an impact on artists with socialist beliefs like Walter Crane (1845–1915) and William Morris (1834–1896). Both Crane and Morris, who used Darwinian ideas to advocate for social change and to rail against capitalism, also incorpo-rated non-western designs into their work, albeit in forms that emphasized the historical and exotic nature of Middle Eastern and Asian cultures. See also Stephen Vernoit, ‘Islamic Art and Architecture: An Overview of Scholarship and Collecting, c. 1850–c. 1950’, in Discovering Islamic Art: Scholars, Collectors and Collections, ed. Stephen Vernoit. London: IB Tauris, 2000.
53 George Birdwood, ‘Preface’, in Eastern Carpets, Vincent Robinson, (London: Henry Sotheran and Co, 1892 (1882)) viii, viii–ix.
54 Ibid., xiii.
55 Wearden, op. cit.; Necipoğlu, op. cit.; Kishwar Rizvi, ‘Art history and the nation: Arthur Upham Pope and the dis-course on “Persian art” in the early twentieth century’, Muqarnas 24 (2007): 44–65, 47.
56 Ali Ansari, ‘‘Persia’ in the Western Imagination’, in Anglo-Iranian Relations Since 1800, ed. Vanessa Martin, London: Routledge, 2005, 15–16.
57 Quoted in Talinn Grigor, ‘Orient oder Rom? Qajar “Aryan” Architecture and Strzygowski’s Art History’, The Art Bulletin 89, no. 3 (2007): 562–590, 582.
58 Dresser, op. cit., 11, 102.
59 Ibid., 161.
60 On criticisms directed towards Persian design innovations, see Donald Wilbur, ‘The Triumph of Bad Taste: Persian Pictorial Rugs’, Hali 2, no. 3, (1979): 192–197. On chemi-cal dyes, see Ittig, ‘Carpets xi. Qajar Period’.
61 British participation in the Persian carpet industry was but one facet of increased commercial, political and military involve-ment in the country. Although this was relatively minor in comparison to contemporary imperial activities in India or southern Africa, Persia remained an important element in the British Empire’s rivalry with Russia over power in Central Asia. See F. Kazemzadeh, ‘Anglo-Iranian Relations ii. Qajar Period’, Encyclopædia Iranica, accessed 23 April 2016 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/anglo-iranian-relations-ii.
62 Peter J. Cain and Antony G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Innovation and Expansion 1688–1914 (London and New York: Longman, 1993) 351–356.
63 Annette Ittig, ‘Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise’, Iranian Studies 25 no. 1–2 (1992): 103–135; Willem Floor, The Persian Textile Industry in Historical Perspective, 1500–1925, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999; Leonard M. Helfgott, ‘Carpet Collecting in Iran, 1873–1883: Robert Murdoch Smith and the Formation of the Modern Persian Carpet Industry’, Muqarnas 7, (1990) 171–181; Leonard M. Helfgott, Ties That Bind: A Social History of the Iranian Carpet. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994; James M. Gustafson, ‘Opium, Carpets and Constitutionalists: A Social History of the Elite Households of Kirman, 1859–1914’ (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2010).
64 Ittig, ‘Carpets xi. Qajar Period’.
65 Ibid.
66 Helfgott, ‘Ties That Bind’, 89; Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism 397, 412–414.
67 Housego, op. cit.; Ittig, ‘Carpets xi. Qajar Period’.
68 Willem Floor, Traditional Crafts in Qajar Iran, 1800–1925 (Costa Mesa: Mazda Publishers, 2003) 10. See also Ittig, ‘Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise’.
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69 Floor, Traditional Crafts, 10; Ittig, ‘Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise’, 213–214.
70 Floor gives a figure of 5,000 looms by the 1880s (Traditional Crafts, 11) while Ittig claims there were 2,700 by 1894 (‘Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise’, 113).
71 Helfgott, op. cit., 216.
72 Caspar Purdon Clarke, ‘Monograph on Oriental Carpets’, in Oriental Carpets, ed. Caspar Purdon Clarke (Vienna and London: Cousins and Co, 1896) 2.
73 The position of museum ‘Art Referee’ was first established in 1857. Art Referee duties included advising on purchases or loans, negotiating purchases, reporting on upcoming sales and compiling catalogues. ‘Precis of the minutes of the Science and Art Department’, Ed84/35, 1852–63, VAM Archive.
74 Birdwood, op. cit., xv-xvi.
75 Cited in Ittig, ‘Ziegler’s Sultanabad Carpet Enterprise’, 119.
76 There do not appear to be any Ziegler carpets in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s current collection.
77 Tomoko Masuya, ‘Persian Tiles on European Walls: Collecting Ilkhanid Tiles in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Ars Orientalis 30 (2000): 39–45.
78 Ibid., 51.
79 Robert Murdoch Smith, ‘Letter to the South Kensington Museum’, MA/1/S2325, 10 June 1875, VAM Archive; R. M. Smith, ‘Letter to the South Kensington Museum’, MA/1/S2325, 1 November 1875, VAM Archive.
80 Robert Murdoch Smith, Persian Art (London: Chapman and Hall, 1876) 5.
81 Ibid., 46. Victoria and Albert Museum, acc. no. 854–1876.
82 Ibid., 4.
83 Anonymous, ‘Persian Art at South Kensington’, The Athenaeum, 2528 (8 April 1876) 506.
84 Wearden, op. cit.
85 Victoria and Albert Museum, acc. no. 151–1883.
86 ‘Polonaise’ carpets are so named because some were exported from Safavid Persia to members of the Polish nobil-ity. The term ‘Holbein carpet’ derives from the appearance of carpets with certain designs in several paintings by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497–1543). See, for example, ‘The Ambassadors’ painted in 1533 (National Gallery, London, acc. no. NG1314). Apart from Walter Denny’s contribution (‘(i) Introduction’) which strongly criticizes the absence of scholarly method in carpet scholarship, such terminology is used throughout ‘Islamic Art, §VI, 4: Carpets and flat-weaves’, Oxford Art Online, accessed 10 November 2015 http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T041771pg35. See also Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope’.
87 B. Morris, op. cit., 102.
88 William Morris, The Collected Letters of William Morris, Volume 1: 1848–1880, ed. Norman Kelvin (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984) 365.
89 Victoria and Albert Museum, acc. no. 719–1897.
90 William Morris, Some Hints on Pattern-Designing (London: Longmans, 1899) 29.
91 Quoted in Malcolm Haslam, Arts & Crafts Carpets (London: David Black, 1991) 56.
92 William Morris, ‘Letter to the South Kensington Museum’, RP/1883/811, 3 February 1883, VAM Archive.
93 Kurt Erdmann, Seven Hundred Years of Oriental Carpets, ed. Hanna Erdmann, May H. Beattie and Hildegard Herzog, trans. (London: Faber, 1970) 27–28.
94 Ibid., 34.
95 William Morris, ‘Letter’, 3 February 1883.
96 Victoria and Albert Museum, acc. no. 272–1893.
97 May H. Beattie, ‘Ardabīl Carpet’, Encyclopædia Iranica, accessed 10 November 2015 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/ardabil-carpet-persian-carpet-acquired-by-the-victoria-and-albert-museum-in-1893. The carpets may have come from the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad and their origin was possibly concealed in order to avoid a diplomatic incident. Rexford Stead, The Ardabil carpets, (Malibu CA: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1974) 36.
98 Erdmann, op. cit., 30. It is unclear when exactly Vincent Robinson and Co took possession of the carpet and whether it was their firm or Ziegler and Co who initially found out about their existence. Erdmann says Vincent Robinson and Co bought the carpet in 1888 while Rexford Stead claims that it was bought in 1891. Erdmann, op. cit., 30; Stead, op. cit., 31).
99 Erdmann, op. cit., 29.
100 David Sylvester, ‘On Western Attitudes to Eastern Carpets’, in Islamic Carpets from the Collection of Joseph V. McMullan: Catalogue of an exhibition at The Hayward Gallery October-December 1972 (London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1972), 10. Neither carpet is fully intact.
101 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, acc. no. 53.50.2. Erdmann, op. cit., 32.
102 Ibid., 29.
103 Ibid.
104 William Morris, ‘Letter to the South Kensington Museum’, RP/1893/27257, 13 March 1893, VAM Archive.
105 Indeed, the highest price paid for a carpet by the museum prior to the Ardabil Carpet was nowhere near this sum; Wearden, op. cit.
106 Erdmann, op. cit., 30.
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107 Savory, op. cit.
108 An example of this is the ‘Polonaise’ groups of carpets, mentioned above. See Daniel Walker, ‘Carpets ix. Safavid Period’, Encyclopædia Iranica, accessed 10 November 2015 http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/carpets-ix. A more historically appropriate term has yet to be suggested in scholarship.
109 Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 827–1877, 832–1877, 834–1877, 836–1877, 837–1877, 838–1877 and 839–1877.
110 Walker, op. cit.; Rudner, op. cit., 50.
111 Denny, op. cit. In addition to Denny, notable carpet scholars include Kurt Erdmann (1901–64), May Beattie (1908–97), Donald King (1921–98), Friedrich Spuhler, Jon Thompson, Annette Ittig, Willem Floor, Daniel Walker, Hadi Maktabi and Yumiko Kamada. See also Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope’ and ‘A Loan Exhibition’.
112 Denny, op. cit. See also Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope’, 10–11.
113 Denny, op. cit.
114 The similar set of circumstances surrounding the early historiography of Persian miniature painting is discussed in Robert Hillenbrand, ‘Western Scholarship on Persian Painting Before 1914: Collectors, Exhibitions and Franco-German Rivalry’, in After One Hundred Years: The 1910
Exhibition “Meisterwerke Muhammedanischer Kunst” Reconsidered, ed. Andrea Lermer and Avinoam Shalem. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010.
115 Scott Redford, ‘“What Have You Done for Anatolia Today?”: Islamic Archaeology in the Early Years of the Turkish Republic’, Muqarnas 24, (2007): 243–252, 245.
116 Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope’, 10, n. 54.
117 ‘About Hali’, Hali, accessed 28 September 2015 http://www.hali.com/about-hali/.
118 Albert F. Kendrick, Guide to the Collection of Carpets, (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office and The Victoria and Albert Museum, 1915) 13.
119 ‘KOUCHAKJI SALE, $55,333. A Persian Ispahan Carpet Brings Top Price, $5,300, on Last Day’. New York Times, 10 March 1918; ‘Final sale of rugs brings in $81,687’, New York Times, 10 January 1926.
120 Arthur Upham Pope, ‘Research Methods in Muhammadan Art’, The Art Bulletin 8, no. 1 (1925): 43–49. See also Kadoi, ‘Arthur Upham Pope’.
121 Pope, op. cit., 48.
122 See, for example, Lord Henry Wootton’s desire to write ‘a novel as lovely as a Persian carpet’ in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray published in 1890. Oscar Wilde, The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, (Ware: Wordsworth Editions, 2007) 32–33. at U
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