The Painted History of Carpets | Special Feature | Christie's

The Painted History of Carpets

William Robinson, Christie's International Specialist Head of Islamic Art and Carpets, finds two rare Islamic carpets in portraits from Cowdray Park. Added as decoration and to underline the sitter’s wealth by the artist at the time of painting, these now provide a hugely valuable source of information for the history of carpet making. Contemporary Islamic miniatures did not aim for pictorial accuracy, so European pictures that include accurately represented carpets are absolutely vital to today’s understanding and chronology of carpets – known as tapetology.

Rare Beyond Compare
The carpet seen in the circa 1630 English School Triple portrait of a lady, thought to be Elizabeth, wife of Sir William Pope, with her children is fascinating. It belongs to an extremely rare group of early Western Anatolian carpets, of which only one complete and one partial carpet have survived. The complete carpet, named the Wind Carpet, was sold at Christie’s on 20 October 1994, lot 519 (illustrated). The other, in the Bayerisches Landesmuseum, Munich, has been chopped through the middle and has different end panels.

A similar detail of carpet seen in the portrait of Elizabeth Pope can also be seen in several paintings attributed to Gheeraerts. This type of carpet is also shown in Hans Holbein’s 1537 portrait of Henry VIII for the Whitehall Mural, perhaps the most impressive of all the portraits of this portrait-loving monarch. The Mural was destroyed in the 1698 fire of Whitehall Palace, but the Flemish artist Remigius van Leemput had made a copy in 1667, now in the Royal Collection, which shows that Henry VIII’s carpet had precisely the same green field colour as that seen with Elizabeth Pope. The carpet in this portrait, and the small group of carpets connected with it, provides a vital link between early carpet design and later, better known, groups.

Lorenzo Lotto’s Carpets
The carpet shown in Marcus Gheeraerts’ Portrait of Frances Howard, painted in 1611, is known as a Lotto carpet. This type of Ushak carpet, woven in Turkey, is named after the painter Lorenzo Lotto, whose paintings helped enormously to date “Lotto” carpets. The special feature seen in Gheeraerts’ Lotto carpet is the cloudband-border – a similar piece with a less stylized border was sold in these Rooms on 17 October 1996, lot 432 (illustrated).

Although the cloudband-border can first be seen in paintings at the beginning of the 17th century, the majority were shown in the 1660s and 1670s, making this one of the earliest examples of that border, and a particularly well-delineated one. The carpets were generally depicted as 'table' coverings, although, in some depictions, they are used on the floor, as in this portrait by Gheeraerts.

Related Sale
Sale 7980
Old Master & British Paintings - Evening Sale
5 Jul 2011
London, King Street