March 2017 – Antique Rug Studio

The Antique Peking Chinese Rug

Carpets have been woven in Peking (Beijing) since the sixteenth century, but the best and most relevant era of antique Peking Chinese rugs classic is the 1880-1930 period. The range of formats, sizes, designs and colors is exceptionally broad. Oval and round rugs, small scatters through room size to mansion dimensions, traditional through Art Deco, blue and white and polychrome. This blog is only a brief overview of a few salient types and styles, and to go deeper would take a full book.

The Chinese invented, first in porcelains and then in other art forms, the blue and white color scheme. Nothing is more classic and says “Chinese” better than an ivory field with a royal blue border or vice versa. Add some paeonies, cloud scroll arabesques, swastika fret allover pattern, exotic Chinese objects, seasonal flowers, birds and butterflies and bats, and the result is always in the best of taste. The Chinese artistic vocabulary is virtually limitless and antique Chinese Peking carpets draw on all of it. Blue and white may be rendered in a classic 18^th century Ningxia style, in a rigourous two-tone Shou medallion carpet or in an oval layout in an antique Fette carpet with a cloud scroll field. Blue and white works well in a more Deco approach with a one corner deer and crane mini-landscape.

Antique Peking rugs can be totally pictorial in the manner of hanging scrolls employing symbolic animals such as cranes, seasonal trees like the pine or bamboo, and one cloud variant or another. Or they can display a ship (junk) before the wind, on a rose tone ocean. Scholar’s rocks, perforated and knobby, are a pictorial mainstay on antique classic Peking carpets. The horizontal handscroll format is perfect to illustrate Daoist immortals or other mythical persons. The smaller pictorial rugs make great wall hangings.

There are rare antique Peking rugs: the small round piece illustrated here with a charcoal open field and dragons with phoenixes seems to be unique. The cracked ice pattern, so frequent on porcelains, seems to be quite uncommon on traditional allover patterned antique Peking carpets.

19643-Email — #19643 Peking 10’5″ x 9’9″

Peking carpets never went as chic as Tientsin (Tianjian) Art Deco carpets with their bold moderne tonalities and wholly abstract pattern. The Fette-LI Company, established around 1923 by Helen Fette, specialized in a less hard edged style with motives adapted from textile and jades in traditional antique Chinese carpet colors, but in renditions tailored to American taste. Round and oval antique Chinese rugs were a Fette specialty. Fettes were the most popular of Peking Chinese carpets in the interwar period. In addition, there were numerous now anonymous Chinese firms producing attractive carpets for American importers.

#20104 Peking 9’6″ x 8’2″

A Sultanabad Carpet that is truly wild and uninhibited. Style trends come. Style trends go. Great, individual art is forever. Art is not something that has to be hung on a wall and intently or idly contemplated. Sometimes it turns up elsewhere and it is no less creative because of it. Great art happens and it is up to us to appreciate it. Some rugs are great art, some are barely acceptable craft.

The Persian carpet revival began in the 1870’s and in the 1880’s the English firm of Ziegler established a substantial presence in and around the town of Sultanabad in Arak province in western Iran. Although a comprehensive firm in its provision of dyed yarn, other materials, designs and cash orders to a vast network of local village weavers, it never organized fixed workshops. Every Ziegler is a folk art production, some more regimented than others. Sometimes something truly exceptional comes through and this is one.

No cartoon, no design sampler here, just the work of a handful of true artists. The wild, eccentric design has no obvious center among the red and ivory escutcheon palmettes, or among the middle blue vertical pendanted cartouches. Everything tilts to one side, but not vertigo-inducing, just enough to give a sense of irregular motion. There is nothing like it in the vast corpus of published Ziegler Sultanabad carpets of the 1882-1930 period. There is nothing like it among Persian carpets period.

The rare yellow border takes as its pattern slices of the allover Herati field pattern omnipresent in Persian rugs, but here much less compact and structured, more crazy and informal. The jogs in the minor guard stripes indicate the “lazy lines” indicative of weaver changes and one day’s work. Who directed the artisans, or did they work on their own? Was eccentricity catching?

Although of carpet size (10.8 by 13.3) our Sultanabad occupies a firm place in the pantheon of true art, not just “carpet art”. Virtually all art is to some degree commercial. The question is not what is the art form, or what are the materials, or what is the originating culture or artist, or how old it is, but only how good it is. This carpet answers that question most admirably.