Early in 1935 I drove south to the ancient and attractive city of Shiraz with an extensive covered bazaar that served as the market for tribal groups from the surrounding countryside. At Shiraz I worked in the very large Majid-i-Atiq, or the Old Mosque, trudging along rain soaked lanes day after day. It may have been this experience, that led me to look down and to discover rugs - and I have been looking down ever since Shiraz. After this discovery I went to the rug section of the bazaar. My finances were so meager that I was limited to spending $25 each for three pieces. Two of these pieces now live near Princeton: one is a jajim, the other a large piece embroidered allover with bright circles and with decorated fringes.
Iran had captured me. I came back, traveling with Arthur Upham Pope, and again in 1939 with Peg, celebrating our honeymoon by more wide ranging travel. World War II brought me back for four years as a member of America's first intelligence service (OSS). In 1939 and during the war we were acquiring Persian art: Kalemkars (printed fabrics), kalemdans (lacquer pen cases), copper and brass items, miniature paintings, and antique Luristan bronzes.
Peg came to join me in 1952 when I was a political officer with the American Embassy, Tehran and we began buying rugs. At a hole in the wall on Firdausi Avenue lived a White Russian who displayed courtly manners, sported a monocle, and sold splendid Kazaks for $35 and up. We lacked the funds to buy all his stock. This avenue was lined with rug shops and from one we emerged with a Heriz, unique because each end displayed a pair of parrots.
In 1958 I joined the Hajji Baba Club of New York and this association with serious and experienced collectors encouraged me to broaden my view of the field. During this year and later ones I was traveling to Iran at least once a year, improving my speaking and reading skills in Persian, and going somewhat less frequently to Afghanistan. I continued to write and publish articles and books on the Middle East.
In November 1973 we were members of a small group that established the Princeton Rug Society. It flourished and, until January 1987, Peg and I obtained a speaker for an illustrated talk once a month from October through May. The editor of Oriental Rug Review holds a complete list of these meetings. During these years we conducted classes on Oriental rugs at the Princeton Adult School and from these classes recruited new members of the Society. At a meeting in January, 1987, Elizabeth Ettinghausen was named president of the Society and she maintains the activity of the Society at a very high level.
With our move in 1988 to a retirement community, we disbanded most of our collection of some 35 pieces, that made up a miscellaneous group with some emphasis on Caucasian rugs. They went to good homes.
With the appearance of Hali in 1978 and Oriental Rug Auction Review in March, 1981, a new world, the unexplored rug world, had its voices.
Entering more deeply into the rug world I, as many other have done, read many rug books and rug auction catalogs and came across many statements that seemed unsound, misleading, or even false, and others that perpetuated some of the romantic tales and myths, spread by early rug dealers. I decided to criticize such material in a number of articles and I believe I became somewhat of a pest, certainly to one respected dealer.
So, here we go. "A Rug is a Rug." This article questioned certain popular attributions. First, there was the so-called "meditation" rugs that are frequently illustrated in rug auction catalogs. In the religious orders of Islam, members follow a special ritual in which they retire to small windowless cells, called "chilled khaneh" to spend several days in meditation. Rugs are not involved.
Along came the subject of Mohtashem. Writers stated several ideas about him including that he was not a weaver but a governor of Kashan who encouraged rug weaving. Rug auction catalogs identified "his" rugs as being most elegant and they went for higher prices than other Kashans. After many years two rugs were located that had inscriptions reading: "work of Hajji Mullah Hasan Mohtashem." They were undated. Mohtashem means "elegant" and this may have been a self awarded title, just as the term "ustad" is self awarded.
A weaver named Hajji lalal has had his name misspelled in four variants in rug books. Said to be from Tabriz, an inscription reveals that he was from Marand, a town to the north of Tabriz.
Given an opportunity to write about Heriz rugs, I began by comparing the accounts of these rugs in a number of books. Most had drawn heavily on Edwards but had different views on the relative merit of the rugs from villages related to Heriz; this seemed curious to me since none of the authors had been to these villages. It became apparent that Edwards understated the time period of production. Three types of Heriz rugs were identified: overall patterns, the traditional Heriz, and a third type that displayed distinctive details common to the so-called Serapi rugs. The source of the Heriz design was not identified, but I do have an illustration of a proto-Heriz and am narrowing in on Qarapinar as a possible source. I need more Qarapinars.
"Heriz Silk Rugs: A Myth". I was puzzled by the fact that Heriz silk rugs drew higher prices at auctions than Tabriz silk rugs, and I tried to see in what way they differed from Tabriz silk rugs. As is well known, Tabriz copied rugs from other areas, particularly Ferahan. I found that a special Ferahan design was repeated in both Tabriz silk rugs and in the Heriz silk rugs. There was similar overlap in rugs that displayed a tree inhabited by a variety of animals. It is my firm opinion that the so-called Heriz silk rugs came from workshops in or near Tabriz and had no relationship to Heriz. A few of these rugs carry poetic inscriptions that supply no information. It should be noted that no standard Heriz rugs have inscriptions, a reflection of their commercial status. I honestly believe that the rug specialists at the major auction houses do read the rug magazines and that the auction catalogs appear to cut down on the number of Heriz silk rugs offered.
I looked at so-called Bakhshaish rugs in an article entitled, "Play It Again Sam, and Play It in Rug Time." I began by searching the rug literature, reading about these rugs in eight rug books, and found a total lack of agreement about these rugs, allegedly woven in a village a short distance south of Tabriz. Then I looked at many, many illustrations of such rugs in books and auction catalogs and found no common ground. I then thought that a distinctive construction featured them, but I learned that some had cotton warps and wefts, some wool warps and cotton wefts, and so on. It seemed to me that the majority were the so-called Serapis and the rest scattered among Tabriz versions of designs common to Kashan and Kerman, and except one that featured very tall, slender trees before a chain of low hills and that included a variety of small elements. This last type I would recognize as a Bakhshaish, the others as Tabriz inspired.
"East Turkestan Rugs: A Puzzlement" represented an investigation into the alleged earlier production of Kashgar, Yarkand, and Khotan. The published sources consulted included H. Bidder, Carpets from Eastern Turkestan; a short text with a number of illustrations from U(lrich) Schürmann's Central Asian Carpets; and Murray Eiland, Chinese and Exotic Rugs. Bidder's book illustrates very similar rugs, assigned to different places, and creates confusion. Our general conclusion was that there are no reliable firsthand accounts of earlier or more recent weaving at any of these places. In a welcome remark Murray Eiland agreed with this conclusion and stressed the need for structural studies in the effort to identify material from different towns. Schürmann displayed a hostile reaction and insisted that several identical fragments came from a very large rug woven in East Turkestan, while others, including Charles Grant Ellis, were sure that the fragments came from a 17th or 18th century Mughal rug.
Enough may be too much. I refrain from continuing this review.
