The time was 1964. The place, the suburbs. My then-wife (Myrna Bloom, of The East-West Room fame) and I set out on the search for our first house. After considerable looking, it became obvious that the house we liked the best was, unfortunately, a bit out of our price range. But being young and foolish and optimistic, we opted for this spacious abode, content to delay furnishing it until another day. Thus, the hardwood floors lay bare, awaiting the time when we would hide them beneath wall-to-wall carpeting, in the tradition of our generation. The living room, devoid of floor covering and furniture, made an ideal hockey rink for my older son and me; for a puck we used a jar cover, for hockey sticks, two brooms. Then, one fateful day, good friends stopped by. "Look what we just bought," announced the wife, as her husband unrolled a small, colorful mat in the middle of my hockey rink.
"What is it?" we inquired.
"An Oriental rug," said she.
"From Anatolia," added he.
"That," Myrna said, "is what I want on the floors -
Oriental rugs, not wall-to-wall."
"I agree," I agreed, and the die was cast.
"Where did you get this lovely mat?" we asked.
"From a charming old woman in Springfield.* (*Places and initials so marked have been changed to protect the guilty.) Her husband was a collector, and now that he's passed on, she's
selling off his collection to keep the wolf from the door."
"But we don't know the first thing about Oriental rugs. How will we know what to buy and at what price?"
"The woman is very knowledgeable and very helpful."
Needless to say, we promptly made an appointment. That she was old and charming (in the way a spider charms its prey) there is no quarrel. We were ushered into a fern-festooned sunporch by a uniformed maid, and there in her high-back wicker wheelchair was the woman herself. We passed several hours being shown various Oriental rugs while Mrs. A * expounded on their provenance, symbolism, and price. In the end, we settled for an Anatolia mat "of considerable age" and promised that we would return to purchase again after we had replenished our bank account.
Our appetite having been whet, we proceeded to visit the showroom of a prominent Philadelphia dealer with our new purchase in hand. On displaying the mat, the dealer immediately asked if, by any chance, we had bought it from an old woman in Springfield who was selling off her husband's collection. Shades of Sherlock Holmes! To make the sad story short, we learned that (a) the mat was not very old, (b) the price was too high, and (c) Mrs. A had been selling off her husband's collection for years, with frequent restockings from New York dealers. We were crushed but undaunted in our pursuit. We decided to become rug- educated.
After wiping out our local library's entire collection of books on Oriental rugs (Jacobsen, Liebetrau, and Lewis) we began our study in earnest. Noting that many of the great old rugs shown belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, we planned an excursion to New York. Arriving breathlessly at the information desk, we inquired where tlie museum's Oriental rugs were housed. "In storage," came the reply, for these were the Dark Ages before the Met opened its permanent Islamic wing. Onward and upward. Despite our setback in New York, and armed with the smattering of knowledge gained through our reading and previous experiences, we next answered an ad in the newspaper for a room-sized Oriental rug. The scenario was to become a familiar one: a young married couple inherited a room-sized Oriental from the husband's parents, but having both grown up with busy-patterned floral living room rugs, they could not abide the things.
Lucky us. Or was this another scam? True, the carpet, about 10'x13', looked like some of the rugs we had seen in some books. But was it worth the approaching-astronomical price of (shudder) $500? We pondered and procrastinated, constantly turning over a corner as we had seen more expert buyers do (the same way a teenage used-car buyer or a nervous father might kick a tire and/or slam a door or two), but we were not really sure what that told us. The colors were pleasing, the design seemed authentic - authentic what we didn't exactly know - and the condition seemed excellent with the exception of one small area punctuated by a number of odd, white cotton knots, which we were later told represented warp threads repaired during the weaving. In the end, we decided to take the plunge, and with trembling hand, I wrote out a check for $500. The carpet was duly rolled up, tied, and carried out to the car at great risk of inducing a double hernia; I could tell that I had a lot to learn about rolling, tying, and lugging rugs, a glaring deficiency in every beginner's rug book I have ever seen in my 20-plus years of collecting.
Although our barren-floor domicile was but a relatively short distance from the site of the great purchase, we decided to forego the immediate joy of trying it out directly, and instead drove furiously through suburbs and city in order to reach the emporium of our friendly rug dealer-advisor before closing time. Breathless and nervous, we unrolled our purchase on his spacious showroom floor.
"How's this one?" we dared.
With a keen eye and deft touch, he pronounced it, "Not bad. How much did you have to give for it?"
"Five hundred," offered Myrna weakly.
"Well, congratulate yourselves. You have a nice Keshan, not terribly old, but certainly worth the price. Of course, you'll want to have it professionally cleaned before you put it down, and you'll need a good pad underneath it to help keep it in good condition."
"Speaking of condition," we inquired, "what should be done in this one area where these strange knots are poking up to the surface?"
"Well, I have an expert restorer who could solve the problem if the knots bother you, but if you're good at doing detailed work, you could actually fix it yourself. All it would take is an eye dropper and a bottle of colored ink."
Myrna, a professional artist, jumped at the suggestion. "Did you say 'good at detailed work'? I'm a painter and I do a lot of very detailed work in my paintings."
"Oh? Is that so? And what do you paint?" It was like asking a proud grandparent about a new addition to the family tree. Out came the photographs, and our dealer-advisor seemed to be genuinely interested. He returned repeatedly to the photo of one particular painting which caught his fancy, inquiring, "What is the size of this painting? What is the price? May I come to see this painting?" Then a thought struck him.
"Would you be at all interested in trading this painting - assuming I like it as much when I see the real thing as I do the photo - for a rug?"
Fate had struck; we agreed, and there lay the beginning of a long and mostly happy relationship with Oriental rugs. Our friendly dealer invited us to come back the next Saturday and select some pieces to consider for the trade. In the interim he came to the house/studio, saw the actual painting, and found it very much to his liking.
The following Saturday, as I recall, we spent the entire day at his shop, oblivious to the passage of time, the need for lunch, the pleadings and proddings of our two young sons, both of whom delighted in making a game of climbing upon and then falling between large rolled up carpets, sneaker protruding in the air, requiring the rescue services of the somewhat unamused salesmen on the floor.
In the end, armed with considerable information that proved to be much more reliable than that dispensed by the "charming" Mrs. A, we selected about six pieces, mostly antique Caucasians, which we were allowed to take home and study for a week while our dealer-mentor considered the proffered painting. By the following Saturday, we had, luckily, both fallen in love with the same rug. And a good thing, too, because it was, of course, the most expensive of the six choices, requiring the exchange of some coin-of-the-realm as well as the coveted canvas.
And there you have it: what we considered our first (alias third) rug: the marvelous "Animal Shirvan" shown in the accompanying photograph, that graced our home - and several shows, lectures, and - publications (e.g., Fiske, Caucasian Rugs from Private Collections, exhibit catalog of The Textile Museum, 1976, Plate 19) before it itself became the subject for a Myrna Bloom painting (see Hali, Volume 2, Number 4, 1980, p. 331). For several years following its acquisition our lives revolved around: ferreting out and devouring as many books on rugs as we could find; weekends spent in dealers' shops and/or at auctions within 100 miles of Philadelphia; trips to museums and New York Rug Society meetings (inevitably followed by a visit to a fellow collector's home and a very late night trip back home amidst the 18 wheelers on the New Jersey Turnpike); annual pilgrimages to Mecca-on-the-Potomac (for The Textile Museum convention); and social plans based on friendships formed with other fanatics. It was a wild, wacky, and wonderful pursuit.
And the painting that we traded for our "first" rug, you ask? I believe it can still be seen in Aram Jerrehian's office. But make sure you check out his rugs, too, if you go to see it.
