Peter Pap at the NY Winter Antiques Show

HALI.com: "Indian Winter


Deccani carpet, south-central India, 18th century. 1.19 x 1.42m (3'11" x 6'6"). Peter Pap at the NY Winter Antiques Show.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

The prestigious New York Winter Antiques show, which opens on Thursday 19th January 2006 at the Park Avenue Armory (until Sunday 29th), is an annual showcase for leading US antique oriental carpet dealer Peter Pap (Dublin NH & San Francisco), at which he regularly represents rugs of beauty and historical significance.



Included in this year's show is an 18th century Deccani carpet, acquired in Japan, of the same general type of Indian export weaving as can be seen adorning some of the floats during Kyoto's annual Gion Matsuri festival. However, this rug can be sourced to a private Japanese collection rather than guild holdings, and is a previously unrecorded example of the type.



Non-Mughal Indian carpets from the Deccan are still quite difficult to identify or to distinguish from better known north Indian carpets, primarily because the process of describing them, 'defining their terms', both aesthetically and technically, is not yet complete. Imperial British Gazetteers from the turn of the 19th century mention an oral tradition which tells of carpet production in the south-central plateau of the Indian subcontinent, the Deccan, which was supposedly active in the 16th century, but if any of those carpets have survived, we would probably not yet be able to recognise them with any certainty. Black and white photographic images of late 19th carpets from traditional south Indian carpet centers such as Warangal, Ellore, Masulipatanam and Ayyampet do appear in a few of the early surveys, but, again, no structural information accompanied those images nor are we certain of their colours.



Until recently, almost the only physical evidence of earlier Deccani carpet production was a series of fairly coarse multiple-niche prayer rugs in museums such as London's Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as two or three odd carpets which had been collected in India in the late 19th century and which were reported at the time to have been made in one of the traditional Deccani carpet weaving centres. The other major sources of early Deccani carpets, private collections in Japan, were almost entirely unknown.



A survey of carpets used in the annual Gion festival in Kyoto, undertaken in 1990 by Nobuko Kajitani and Daniel Walker, was published in both English and Japanese and as a result, our present understanding of a wider range of Deccani carpets produced in the late 17th, 18th and early 19th centuries specifically for the Japanese export market, has expanded greatly.



Structurally, some Deccani carpets which are documented to have been in Japanese collections since the 18th century more closely resemble Iranian models (so-called Esfahan carpets) with Z4S white cotton warps and less alternate warp displacement than found in most north Indian Mughal carpets. But at the same time, they exhibit those two typically Mughal design characteristics: a fondness for ton-sur-ton colouring and an almost promiscuous display of racemes. These are definitely Indian carpets, but not from the north. Other 18th century Deccani specimens in Japan exhibit structures identical to standard north Indian Mughal carpets with Z6-8S white cotton warps, but their designs are so odd that they too must be Deccani variants.



The Pap carpet, accompanied by ample evidence supporting its 18th century date, including a meticulously labelled wooden storage box, is one of those structurally ambiguous examples. Measuring 1.19 x 1.42m (3'11" x 6'6"), its multiple-stranded warps could belong to a north Indian carpet, while its brown wefts and moderate alternate warp depression are features more suggestive of Deccani weaving.



Both the border and central field designs can be found on 17th century north Indian carpets, but here their scale has been altered, displaying a relative lack of design sophistication more often encountered on Deccani carpets. A section of a balanced, symmetrical large-scale floral arabesque field design intended for a much larger carpet has been used to fill the central field of this smaller carpet. In order to accommodate the border to border repeat, the design has been turned at right angles to the weave. This is indicative of 18th century commercial production, as is the fairly coarse knotting.



The Kyoto carpet is charming, with bright colours and a naïve appeal, and it is obviously of historical importance. Two 18th century carpets illustrated in Kajitani and Yoshida's 1992 Japanese catalogue of carpets in Kyoto exhibit quite similar central field designs (nos.19 & 20), while the border of no.33 is very close to the border of the Pap carpet, although structurally, we are told that no.33 has blue, rather than brown, cotton wefts.



Also included in Pap's Armory display is another 17th/18th century carpet, arguably of Indian origin, and certainly with an 'Indian' design, but which has been the subject of much to-and-fro theorising over the years. First tentatively attributed to northwest Persia in 1988 in an article by Ian Bennett published in Weltkunst, it later appeared in Alberto Levi's 1993 article on 'Proto-Kurdish' weaving (HALI 70, p.88, fig.50). Later the same year it came up for auction in the Jon Thompson sale at Sotheby's in New York (lot 79), equally tentatively assigned to 17th century India, although at the time HALI preferred to persist with a probable northwest Persian attribution (HALI 73, p.134). Then, in the 1997 Metropolitan Museum catalogue Flowers Underfoot, Daniel Walker cited it as one of two possible symmetrically-knotted Indian relatives of the 'Kyoto' group, the other being a fragment advertised by Jeremy Pine in HALI 78 (p.56).
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IMAGE DETAILS

1. Indian or northwest Persian Carpet, 17th/18th century. 1.50 x 3.48m (4'11" x 11'5"). Peter Pap at the NY Winter Antiques Show "