Charles Grant Ellis is considered by most knowledgeable rug people to be America's most eminent rug scholar in the second half of the century, and some might even say of all time. His writings have focused on classical rugs and he has traveled extensively around the world to museums, dealers, and private collections examining and recording data on all he sees. His records probably contain more information on more rugs than any other single archive in the world.
Charlie grew up in Kingston in upstate New York, the only child of a minister, the self-described source of later difficulties in his life. A compulsive gatherer of data in his youth, he became an expert on dinosaurs, warships, hummingbirds, and the characteristics of automobiles. With an excellent secondary education, he went off to Princeton in 1926, reluctantly, for the Naval Academy at Annapolis was a choice which he had been persuaded not to pursue.
His efforts at Princeton were generally disasterous. He describes it as a loss of motivation and focus, but more likely his interests were too many to be harnessed into a single direction at that time. He gravitated to architecture and art studies, but after one withdrawal and return in 1931 he left for good without graduating.
In September of that year he married Gretchen Hart Snyder in the living room of the house in which they now live. She has been his wife, champion, and companion of the past 57 years.
He traveled to England in 1938 where he photographed some 600 English parish churches. Later he went to work for Bausch & Lamb Optical in Rochester. On December 8, 1941. he enlisted in the United States Navy as an apprentice seaman. After serving in the Atlantic, Caribbean and Pacific. he was discharged in September, 1945. as a Chief Signalman and returned to Kingston to live. It was shortly after this that he became involved in Oriental rugs and where our interview begins. [Ed. Note: Charles Grant Ellis passed away in 1997]
Charlie's First Time
ORR: What prompted you to buy the first rug you bought and when was that?
Ellis: The first time I bought a rug was shortly after I came home from the service in 1946 or '47. I bought the rug at a women's exchange which was operated for the Junior League here in Kingston. I had gone in to buy a piece of jewelry for Mrs. Ellis, and there were several Oriental rugs which looked quite interesting and it just happened that the timing was right. I had quite recently had the local Armenian, Reupen Gullian, check over the rugs which I had inherited from my mother so that he could give me prices on cleaning them and making such repairs as were needed to put them in decent order. He gave me very reasonable and satisfactory prices considering that this was the time when people where not having that kind of work done on their rugs. He was anxious to have the work, so I had him go over all my mother's rugs and put them in condition for further use. It was at this time that I went in and found a quite interesting Shirvan or Daghestan rug and I thought this might be a nice thing to have. So when I went home, I asked Mrs. Ellis what she thought and she said, "Why not buy it if you like it." I called Reupen and asked him, and he said he had worked on getting that group of rugs ready for the sale and, if I wanted to buy more rugs, I should insist that the woman in charge bring out the rug hidden under the counter. So I bought that rug, too, and that is the rug which I used as the illustration for a Kerman in the current Britannica.
ORR: That is the rug on the floor here?
Ellis: Yes, which has the vases with flowers in four panels.
ORR: It is a Lavar Kerman?
Ellis: I don't know what the dealer terminology is. It is what I would call a floral Kerman. They used to call them rose Kermans, but I'm not so sure they are roses.
ORR: So buying your first rug wasn't the first time that you had lived with them?
Ellis: I had grown up with a certain number of Persian rugs around the house; a Chinese rug was the dining room rug. I had been with my mother when she bought it in New York and it was an interesting experience. I was a teenager at the time. I remember going through the big stack of rugs, blue ones, from which she made her selection. It was in the 1920s. I was born in 1908; 1 would guess it would have been 1923-25.
ORR: So you bought your first rug...
Ellis: So I bought my first rug through the women's exchange. The other rugs didn't please me so much, so I left them. Then I found a small rug in a house sale, a little Turkoman rug, and bought that, and then I bought a Caucasian rug at an auction. I thought I was very brave, and then I proceeded from one thing to another. I would borrow a book and in due course buy a book and buy a rug. Back and forth. It was some time before I ventured into a proper dealer's shop. I was, of course, concerned for fear that I would take a skinning. I wanted to really build up my personal confidence before I ventured into a shop.
ORR: What books were you buying back in the '40s?
Ellis: The books I was exposed to and bought were Mumford and Dilley and...
ORR: Lewis, G. G. Lewis?
Ellis: Lewis? No, he came somewhat later and I took a dim view of him from the time I got my hands on it. I got one of Jacobsen's early books and didn't put a great deal of faith in him, although I started getting him to send me some rugs on consignment and found some quite interesting pieces which I bought. I never bought anything of any size from him. And so I proceeded going around trying to pick up rugs at auctions for a time, and then I started visiting certain dealers and buying from them.
ORR: This sounds like a normal progression.
Ellis: It is not at all unusual.
Ellis: It happened in the late '50s, the tag end. I think it was nore or less in the mid-'50s when I developed a certain amount of superficial savoir faire about rugs, as a collector operating strictly by himself might do. And I had an aunt who lived up in the Catskills where I had lived before the war, and I used to buy her Antiques Magazine for some years, and she reported to me at some point that the Fogg Museum in Cambridge had an exhibition of Joseph McMullan's rugs which was the largest collection of antique Turkish rugs ever put together under one roof. This sort of nettled me because I didn't think it was any such thing. I thought that probably it was not by any means the equal of Ballard's collection. I decided I would go and have a look.
I got in the car and made an appearance in Cambridge, and I found that the exhibition had closed. A few rugs were still on the walls, but most were still down in the basement; McMullan had taken one station wagon load away. The director was very kind and turned me loose in the basement for a couple of days, with a babysitter, to unroll the rugs and look at them. I thanked him and he said, "Why don't you get in touch with McMullan" and so I did. I wrote him a letter which I thought was rather challenging in certain ways. And, Bingo! I got a letter back by the next mail inviting me down for the next meeting of the Hajji Baba Club. He had taken exception to something or other that I had written.
So I went down and I think we were to meet at Kerekin Beshir's shop and then go to a restaurant afterwards. McMullan was nowhere in evidence, and I went around and there was an Englishman, Storm Rice, a very eminent Islamic scholar I found out later, and he had been invited by McMullan. He didn't know McMullan by sight and I didn't either. But still no McMullan. So it was awkward, and we were made at home by various club members and their wives. Eventually, McMullan showed up and, later in the evening or, rather, early in the morning, he invited me and others to come to his house and he ushered me out his front door at 3:00 in the morning, undressing in the process. He had his shirt off, I think he was about to take his pants off, and as I went out the door he said, "It was nice meeting you," and I thought, "I'll never see you again."
I went home, and the following weekend there was a sale at Saugerties upriver and in that sale there was a Turkish rug precisely the type that Joe used to enjoy buying. So I took one look at that and I bought it for $27 and, as soon as I got it home, I took a photo and sent it to Joe. I don't think I even wrote a letter. By return mail I got a note asking if I wanted to join the Hajji Baba Club; he would be glad to put me up for it. I went down and found most of the people there very pleasant and nice to get along with and the whole atmosphere at that point was very congenial.
ORR: So you did this with one year of German?
Ellis: Yeah, one year plus, I think. And the plus I failed miserably, as I recall.
ORR: And you had never spoken it or used it?
Ellis: No, I had not used it at all in the meantime. This business is going on in 1956-58 or so, and I had studied German in 1930, about. So, at any rate, I made my translation available and he liked it. But he had corrections he wanted to make, some of which were very necessary for I hadn't understood abbreviation in German. And then his publishers were willing to have the book published, and I decided because Riefstahl had put a bunch of translator's notes in the third version why didn't I do something like that for the fourth edition on the various points that I didn't agree with; and so I did. Then the game began because, as I supplied translator's notes, he would incorporate them into his text. He'd absorb them. So it got to be rather a question of whether I would end up with notes or not, because so many of them went right into his text - which was very astonishing!
ORR: Your translation was of the third edition?
Ellis: No, the fourth edition. Riefstahl had translated the third edition. So eventually it was published. Now it has been republished in England and by Cornell University Press with slight changes.
ORR: Something that's on my mind at the moment: did Kühnel delete references to Mamluk rugs from the fourth edition that had been in the previous edition?
Ellis: I don't recall he did, but I hadn't made that comparison.
ORR: Perhaps because he was working on the Cairene book?
Ellis: He was very, very chary about changing Bode. He was afraid he would be criticized for changing Bode and did so only to the degree that he felt obliged to. Some would think he made a mistake by changing Bode at all. Why did you ask that?
ORR: We've published a review by (Roger) Gardiner of Spuhler's book in which he makes a remark about how the Germans want to attribute Mamluks and that Kühnel eliminated references to Mamluks in the fourth edition.
Ellis: (Getting the book from the shelf) They had called them different things. They were called Damascus carpets in the third edition, and they are called Mamluk in the fourth edition. He illustrated three and calls them Mamluk in the fourth, and in the third they are so-called Damascus carpets and he illustrates two. It would take too long to sort through the texts to determine what was actually written.
Ellis: Well, having done the Kühnel translation, about the time that was finished the Erdmann (Oriental Carpets, An Account of their History) came out and it was a more modern handbook, more thorough and up-to-date, but I felt that it was very flawed. Never mind that, but the Kühnel had been a revision of a revision and something Bode had written about 1904, whereas Erdmann was producing a somewhat similar book and it was fresh. I felt that the same group of people who had been interested in Kühnel would like Erdmann in English, and at that point I translated some of it for The Textile Museum and eventually I translated the whole thing.
I had finished the translation when Erdmann came over for the Congress of Persian Art and Archeology, which was held in New York, Philadelphia, and Washington in 1960. I believe I had been corresponding with Erdmann for some time and, during that trip, he decided to come up for a visit. He was going to give a talk at the Persian Congress on a certain class of carpets of interlaced bands which he considered Persian, and he wanted it put into English. I'm a bit confused about this, but he had become annoyed at the Congress because some of the Persians had been so long-winded at a session in the Parke-Bernet that there was no time for him to give his talk. So he said he would give his talk to the Hajji Baba Club instead. And he was sitting with me; I had to scramble to get in touch with the president of the Hajjis, who I think was Straka at the time, and he had to head off Dimand, the Met curator, who was scheduled to give the next lecture, and inform him.
At the close of the Congress, Erdmann and his wife Hanna came up for a visit and stayed here for some days. The first thing we did was to put that article into English so he could deliver it to the Hajjis. (It ended up in an added volume of the Survey.) After that, we dealt with the translation of his carpet book. We sat down at a card table, and I sat on one side and Hanna sat on the other and Kurt sat on the third side between us. Hanna would read a sentence in German and I would give my English version, and I would give whatever objections I had to it and she would start to squawk and he would say "Shhh!" and then he would tell me whether he accepted my translation or whether he had any objections. And so we worked through it in that fashion. It took several days. Gretchen got more and more nervous while this was going on. And Hanna was getting nervous, too, because it was outrageous to have this Johnny-jump-up American telling K.E. what was wrong with his book about carpets. And so we settled on the text and went on from there.
ORR: What was Erdmann's position at this time?
Ellis: He was director of the Museum of Islamic Art in West Berlin.
ORR: And Kühnel?
Ellis: Kühnel had retired at that point. He was working on a book on ivories.
ORR: When that translation came out, it must have been in a very small edition?
Ellis: I got after Crosby for not having asked permission and I eventually got five percent.
ORR: He reprinted without authorization?
Ellis: Well, without my authorization. I said, "Fine. Will you give me a five percent translator's royalty?" About that time, I wrote the two German houses prohibiting them from reprinting the books without my getting a royalty. Of course, both took violent umbrage at that. They were used to absolute free rides. But Cornell Press didn't want to pay anything either on the Bode-Kühnel.
Ellis: Yes, at that point I had been appointed to a position there.
ORR: As research associate?
Ellis: Yes.
ORR: And were you the first one they had?
Ellis: No, that is why I was research associate. Sawyer asked me to go on staff. If I would move to Washington, he would put me on the payroll as curator, but otherwise he would put me on but at no pay. He wanted me to write an article for the TM Journal which he was just getting started, and I was to act as carpet advisor in general. He gave me a choice as to the title I chose to adopt. At that point, old Rudolf Berliner was a research associate in connection with the Coptic stuff. He wrote a Germanic English which had to be translated into proper English in order to be publishable. He was getting about $1,500 a year for that. At any rate, I didn't want to upstage him as he was very distinguished in the field. Why should I be anything else? If that is what he was, that is what I would be. I might have been smarter if I had said I was research curator, because it has come up later from other institutions as to what was my status there.
ORR: Had that relationship grown out of your Hajji Baba membership?
Ellis: It had grown out of the fact that I had made several trips down there and become friendly with Francina Greene, the director, and Louisa Bellinger. They had been kind and gracious. So when Sawyer came in as director, someone suggested that we put on a show of rugs belonging to members of the Hajji Baba Club. I was the member with the free time, and so I could go down and spend time there for several weeks helping to get the show organized and hung on the walls, and I wrote catalog material for it. It was never properly printed, simply duplicated.
ORR: At this point, how do you regard yourself! Are you a scholar, collector, Hajji Baba member, translator, what?
Ellis: I certainly didn't consider myself a collector. I hadn't bought a rug for years, so I was not an active collector. Inactive, yes, because I still had rugs which we lived with. I hesitate to call myself a scholar because the amount of actual scholarly endeavor I had put in did not come up to proper standards. On the other hand, I think I am knowledgeable about antique carpets. But I am not sure that anyone is more knowledgeable unless it's May Beattie and, with her, it is a question of the degree to which she continues to function as a rug scholar.
Ellis: I became interested in the classical rugs through my membership in the Hajji Baba Club and by being exposed to them there. We talked about them at Hajji meetings and through acquaintance with various people who were tops in the field. Those people were Dimand in New York, and Dilley - at least he had that reputation, whether justified or not - and Kühnel and Erdmann.
ORR: Had you seen the Ballard and Altman rugs at the Met?
Ellis: I'm trying to put it in a time frame of when I started going to American museums. I'm not sure whether it was before I went around to the European museums or not. I made my first European trip in 1964. It may be that I started going to American museums between 1960 and 1964. I could probably sort it out by looking at my past correspondence, but during that time I visited the principal American museums and saw what they had in storage.
ORR: Do you have a photographic memory? How is it that you can remember all of these details?
Ellis: Fortunately, I have been blessed with a very good memory - I would not say a photographic memory, but a very good one, which, of course, as I approach 80 tends to have its gaps. It doesn't work now as smoothly as I would like.
ORR: When I sent you a photograph of the Mamluk rug I found in Princeton, how, for example, did you remember seeing it at a dealer's shop in Italy? Do you keep 3x5 cards on these things, or do you just recall from memory?
Ellis: I had a photograph of that rug from Cittone when I saw it. I'm not certain exactly when, but I think I saw it in 1964.
ORR: Yes, and two years later the Princeton owners bought it at auction in Paris.
Ellis: Yes, of course, because when a rug doesn't sell, the dealer sends it off to somewhere else to sell. So I keep records on a great many rugs but there are gaps. Ever so often, I see a rug and I think, "I've forgotten all about this one!"
ORR: I notice in the book you pulled out you had marginal comments on where similar rugs were.
Ellis: Yes, I do that and I have a photo file on such rugs. I have extensive photo files. They are mostly museum and dealer photographs. Most of my books are interlarded with comments referring to illustrations of similar rugs in other publications. And I have done a certain amount of that to books in the TM.
ORR: But you don't keep 3x5 cards or something similar?
Ellis: No, I'm not that organized. I could be better organized and I recognize that. I could be keeping things on cards that I could stick a pin in like John Mills has.
ORR: Have you considered using a computer to keep track of this data?
Ellis: Not seriously because I felt that I would put so much time into entering it, and I was not sure how much use it would be to anyone else. I might get hit by a truck at that point and that would be the end of that.
ORR: I find it interesting that you have all of this data. Why doesn't some institution like the TM or the Metropolitan or NYU provide you with a graduate student to analyze some of this data?
Ellis: Should I say general stupidity? The nearest I am getting to that are suggestions from Carol Bier (of the Textile Museum) recently.
Ellis: Well, I think there is a Berlin School and I have said so, I think, in print several times. And Spuhler is one of the latest examples of that school and the leading example at this point. It is characteristic of that group that they have hesitated to get too far ahead of their predecessor for fear of criticism; that is a problem that Kühnel had and that Erdmann had. Erdmann was much more innovative, but he was loathe to make adequate use of his ideas because of the flak he would run into because it differed so much from Bode. And which had been cultivated in the meantime not only by Kühnel but also by Sarre. And there were others. And Ettinghausen, I would say, was of the same school so to speak. Maybe his wife would object to that, but I think he felt more or less that way, however. But many of these people were not rug people as much as Islamic scholars, but they felt they had to know something about rugs or pretend to be knowledgeable as a part of the discipline.
ORR: Well, what Gardiner said was they were afraid to break away which led to rigidity in their thinking and created problems, such as the attribution of the Damascus group where Spuhler sticks with a Turkish attribution because he's afraid to challenge the earlier scholars.
Ellis: I forget. But Spuhler knows that I know of quite a wide variety of rugs quite aside from the compartment rugs we associate with that group. There were these medallion rugs which are still in storage in the Turk ve Islam in Istanbul. And they belong to what I consider the Damascus group, and have exactly the same color range and technique.
ORR: And they are published in the new book?
Ellis: They are not published really. A detail taken from one of them is published in the new book, and that is all. But, as for the Washington school, that is something else again. I have been trying to indoctrinate some of these younger people. I haven't done very well with Walter Denny. Walter, I think, is inclined to worry about getting too far off the reservation and Louise Mackie the same way, but I have tried to lead them off the reservation in the direction of new ways of looking at things. We may end up with the right idea or the wrong idea. Who knows?
ORR: Why were there never any important rug studies in London? Why were Kendrick and Tattersall never as important as Bode, Kühnel, and Erdmann?
Ellis: Mmmmm, I don't know. The question of producing a handbook makes a lot of difference. I think May might resent being part of the Washington school that I had part to do with and that these other people had to do with. She had been over there in the north of England. You talk about a British tradition, she IS the British tradition perhaps.
ORR: And yet one thinks of the Victoria and Albert Museum as having the outstanding collection.
Ellis: But they have not chosen to devote themselves to rugs. They have not had the rug people. Donald King has done some useful things, especially the '83 Conference and catalog. May has not worked and talked that much with us in late years. She has been working in parallel with some of us but not perhaps enough to give Roger that idea, for May has her own ideas, and I think that at times she may have been concerned that I had more ideas and maybe better ideas than she did, which is not necessarily the case.
Ellis: Pope was a mouthpiece. Pope was a money raiser. He was an artist with words back in the day when you could throw words around in a way you can't anymore. His writings are very mellifluous - somewhat on the same general order as Dilley except that Pope was much more of a salesman than Dilley could ever be. Ackerman was smarter, I think, than Pope. She had been one of Pope's students, and she made herself into quite a guru in the field of textiles and iconography. I'm not sure how valid a lot of her stuff was.
ORR: Do you see her more in the rugs in the Survey than Pope?
Ellis: No, that was Pope pretty much and a lot of it is blather. He asked me at one point to go over it all and determine the errors of fact, not of opinion but errors of fact. And I provided such a lot of them that he lost the list. I got a request again later, only from the chap who was editing the stuff for the Japanese and I provided it to him, and I had compiled I don't know how many pages of errors of fact, which were my findings plus Erdmann's findings, plus various of May's findings and so forth.
OKR: It still amazes me how you start with rugs in 1947 and by 1960 you have emerged on the scene; you are able to translate, understand, and comment on Bode-Kiihnel and with Erdmann and discussing this with him. Given the literature of the time, how did you do that?
Ellis: Well, I pride myself to quite a degree that for a long period of time, until Erdmann died - and he died in 1964, I saw him in Berlin that year. I wrote him and in every letter told him something about rugs that he had never known before.
ORR: But, in terms of your own reading and learning, you're doing this in English, not French or Italian or Persian?
Ellis: I read French; I have trouble with Italian. I studied Spanish, French, and German, but no Middle Eastern languages. I think May has much greater linguistic ability than I.
Part 2 of our conversation with Charles Grant Ellis will include such topics as Is Everything Indian?, Thoughts on Museums, and Trips and Rugs in Japan. Stay tuned.
