Antique Turkish Oushak

Oushak in western Turkey was an important centre of carpet production almost from the beginning of the Ottoman peirod. Many of the great masterpieces of the early Turkish carpet weaving from the fifteenth to seventeenth century were attributed to Oushak. Less is known however, what happens with the production there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries earlier. If things clearer to 1900, Oushak re-emerges as an important centre, this time for room-size decorative carpets. Oushak carpets such as these are very desirable today as decorative pieces. They come in the central medallion design as well as patterns of small allover medallions or scattered sprays of vinescroll and palmettes. They are characterized by large, monumental scale of the design. Oushak rugs often have a subdued palette of soft apricot and golden saffron tones, their positive qualities are by their very soft and shiny wool.

British Carpets in the 18th and 19th Centuries

CARPET WEAVING IN ENGLAND was now flourishing and around this time Kidderminster was also beginning to become a centre for carpet making. The town had had a weaving industry since the 16th century and Kidderminster carpets are mentioned as early as 1635 in an in-ventory of a bedchamber of a Lady Lettice, though the precise meaning of the word cannot be clear. CARPET WEAVING IN ENGLAND was now flourishing and around this time Kidderminster was also beginning to become a center for carpet making. The town had had a weaving industry since the 16th century and Kidderminster carpets are mentioned as early as 1635 in an inventory of a bedchamber of a Lady Lettice, though the precise meaning of the word cannot be clear.In 1751 Richard Po Cocke, in his Travels through England, mentions that the town was famous for carpets and by 1800 the carpet industry had become the town?s major employer, although the trade was threatened by the Earl of Pembroke?s Wilton Carpet Manufactory. It is known that one manufacturer, John Broom, went to Brussels and Tournai to learn the new techniques, although only two of the many original firms were to survive the technical innovations of the Industrial Revolution later in the century. In 1760 the Royal Society held an exhibition in their Great Room for a fortnight, showing two carpets from each of their leading premium winners-Whitty, Moore and Passavant. Whitty wrote of his success: ?These repeated Successes so advanced the reputation of my carpets, that I had a constant and almost uninterrupted demand for many years.?The fasion of the times was to have the pattern of the CARPET reflect the painted ceiling. Thomas Moore, Whittys main competitor was a friend of Robert Adam, who directed business to Moorfields where he could personally supervise the production of his designs. Moore?s factory declined when Adam died in 1792 and was sold for other purposes in 1795.The other premium winner did not survive either: Passavant does not seem to have made much after 1760 and went bankrupt the following year. However, Whittys Axminster factory continued to prosper. Within five years Whitty had established his factory as a leading concern in the towns economy. It was the custom for the finer completed carpets to be taken to the Congregationalist Church to be spread over the pews for all to admire and for thanks to be offerd for their completion before they were sent to their destination.On August 13 1783 George the 3rd and the Queen had visited the Factory, which had resulted in a flood of orders. The Crown Prince, later George the 4th, order several carpets, including one for the Throne Room at Carlton House.
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Oriental Carpets & Rugs

The Oriental carpet has always been synonymous with exotic luxury, elegant design, and a comfortable, highly aestheticized environment. From the earliest times, humans have needed to embellish and ornament the circumstances in which they lived, and the medium of woven carpets soon emerged to meet such requirements. Carpet production is attested from ancient times. Flatwoven floor coverings are probably as old as textiles and architecture. The oldest knotted pile carpets can be attested by the sixth century B.C., but their production may well be considerably older. Some experts believe that pile carpets originated among tent-dwelling nomadic peoples to the east of Central Asia as a more decorative substitute for animal hides, providing comfort and insulation as well as decoration. Carpet making reached the Near East through contact with such nomadic peoples. Since relations between Central Asian nomads and the Near East were more or less constant, the production of pile carpets in the latter region was probably stimulated and influenced by nomadic traditions again and again.This process first becomes clear in the medieval period, between the eleventh and the fourteenth centuries, when various Central and East Asian peoples like the Turks and Mongols came to power across the eastern Islamic world, bringing with them traditions of carpet making that were by now many centuries old. The earliest Near Eastern carpets of this kind are those of Seljuk Turkey and those made in Iran under the Mongol and Timurid dynasties. Carpets of this kind now began to have highly complex designs influenced by contemporary textiles, especially silks.From this period on, the knotted pile carpet became an increasingly standard feature of Islamic art and high culture, and soon it captured the attention of wealthy Europeans as well. Already by the thirteenth century merchant travelers like Marco Polo remarked on the beauty of the Oriental carpets they encountered on their journeys, and soon such carpets began to be imported into Venice and thence to the rest of Europe. While actual early carpets of this kind are rarely preserved, European painting by the great masters from Giotto and Ghirlandaio to Holbeim, van Eyck, Lotto, and Vermeer constantly depict carpets from Turkey and Iran. Such paintings document the importance that the Oriental carpet had attained by this time as a quintessential symbol of cosmopolitan taste and affluence. So valued were these carpets that there were various attempts to imitate or adapt them in Europe.After the seventeenth century Europeans briefly lost interest in the Oriental carpet. This probably reflected developments in the Near and Middle East, where all the great ruling dynasties collapsed or went into regression, bringing about a corresponding roll-back in the quantity and quality of carpet production. During this hiatus European carpet production was stepped up, creating the Aubusson and Savonnerie types in a Neo-Classical western style. Carpet production in Spain, which had begun under Muslim rule in the Middle Ages, also moved in to meet the European demand for rugs.In the second half of the nineteenth century, rug weaving in Iran went into a great period of revival under the highly retrospective Qajar dynasty, re-awakening the European interest for Oriental carpets and creating a new American market for them as well. This eventually led to a revival or expansion of carpet production in Turkey and also a revival of Indian carpet weaving under British rule. At this time Chinese carpets, whose production went back to ancient times, finally became known in quantity to European and American markets.From that time on the western world became used to an endless variety of Oriental rugs and carpets whose production continues into the present time. The most notable recent developments are the revival of vegetable dyes and hand-spinning of wool, which had largely died away in the course of the twentieth century. Such new productions capture much of the quality and original flavor of antique Oriental rugs. But only a genuine antique can preserve the soul and spirit of Oriental rug weaving, an art form that reaches back virtually unbroken to the earliest times. Antique Oriental rugs are not only objects of great beauty and rarity; they are a much-needed bridge to a bygone world of consummate skill and expressiveness that is vastly different from the mass-culture of modern western experience.

Bergama Village Rugs and the Early Turkish Carpet

Turkish rugs occupy an unusual position in the rug world. During the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, they were the decorative rug par excellence, dominating the market in Europe and even in Middle East itself. As early as the late thirteenth century the famous traveler Marco Polo commented on the high esteem in which Turkish carpets were held. Throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the great master painters of Europe relied upon Turkish rugs as background props that could immediately suggest the status and prestige of the various personages they depicted. Only in the course of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did Persian rugs and carpets attain the standing they now occupy as the pre-eminent or standard oriental carpet for home decor. Nowadays with the exception of Oushak or Sivas carpets, Turkish rugs are primarily attractive to collectors who eagerly seek out scatter sized rugs produced in the villages across Asiatic Turkey. Among such Turkish village production, a few types hold a special prominence for their exceptional color and their sense of nomadic or tribal design ? the Yuruks of Eastern Turkey, the Konya and Karapinar rugs of Central Turkey, and the Melas and Bergama rugs of the western Anatolian region. Within such production Bergama rugs have a special place because of the high quality of their weave and the purity of their design, which has remained faithful to the types documented in Renaissance painting right into the nineteenth century, if not later.Antique Bergama Turkish RugThe example shown here (40792) reproduces the so-called Ghirlandaio type, so named because they were depicted by the great Italian master Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449-1494). Though very probably produced in the mid nineteenth century, this example comes extremely close to the few carpets of this type that can be dated to the fifteenth century, as well as to the examples depicted by Ghirlandaio himself. The medallions consist of various segments or facets adapted from a classic type of Islamic architectural decoration known as ?mugarnas.? The small indentations along the edges are elaborated by tiny squares with angular hooks. The medallions on this rug are an elaborated type where the muqarnas elements are expanded outward and grouped around a central square enclosing an octagon. The stepped cornerpieces also have muqarnas fillers and more of the little hooked squares within each step. The border consisting of radial clusters of four serrated leaves is also an early type attested among the oldest extant Ottoman rugs and in Renaissance paintings.What is so striking about Northwest Turkish village rugs like this is their commitment to tradition as well as to superior technical standards. Eastern Anatolian or Yuruk rugs of the nineteenth century also derive from the same early traditions as Bergama pieces, but they seldom preserve the precise ornamental detail or the rich, varied palette of multiple reds, blues, greens, and yellows (690). It is therefore not uncommon to find that northwest Turkish or Bergama pieces may be dated much too late, or, at times, too early. Coming up with precise dates for pieces within such a conservative tradition is sometimes quite difficult.Antique Bergama Turkish Carpet PhotoThe term Bergama is actually a catch-all popular in the rug trade for various local antique productions from the areas around Bergama as well, whose specific identity is only now becoming better known. Many of the pieces commonly dubbed as Bergama were made in the villages of Yacgibedir, Ezine, Balekesir, or Canakkale. This last type is especially recognized by its palette and designs. Canakkale rugs like this example of the mid nineteenth century (723) have a distinctive rich apricot or salmon ground accompanied by liberal amounts of soft sky blue, pale celadon greens, and golden yellows, in conjunction with ivory. The designs on Canakkale rugs derive from early Turkish carpets of the so-called ?Holbein? type, so named because they appear in the paintings of the Northern Renaissance artist Hans Holbein the Younger (1497-1543). The octagonal medallions with edges elaborated by serial pairs of curling hooks are the ?Holbein? elements of classical Turkish derivation, as are the cornerpieces with deep cruciform indentations. The border too is an ancient type attested in the earliest Turkish rug production. But the overall design of Canakkale rugs like this one is not quite as old as the component motifs. The arrangement of the medallions in a group of four linked by bands with little hooks comes from a different classical Turkish source, the so-called Star Ushak carpets of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which have four-lobed, star-like medallions. The original aspect of the Canakkale design is its combination of the star Ushak scheme with Holbein medallion elements. This development is difficult to date, but it probably came about early in the eighteenth century and continued into the nineteenth. There are even early twentieth century examples of this design, although these tend to loose the celadon and golden tones. During the nineteenth century though, Canakkale weavers evolved a simpler version of this pattern with a looser grouping of the medallions better suited to scatter size rugs. But these still continued to use elements of ?Holbein? type.The highly traditional or conservative nature of antique Bergama or Northwest Turkish rugs is particularly interesting and relevant to rug enthusiasts who appreciate the special beauty of early Turkish carpets. Apart from fragmentary and damaged examples, actual early pieces of this type from before 1600 are exceedingly rare outside the museums specializing in historic rugs and textiles, and when they do appear on the market they command prices that even museums can no longer afford. Bergama rugs therefore offer the realistic possibility of acquiring genuine antique Turkish pieces which have preserved virtually intact the extraordinary sense of design and color for which early Turkish rugs are so prized. As such they are a collector?s dream in a world where dreams no longer come so easily.

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Browse through Our Impressive Collection of Antique Oriental Carpets

If you're in the market for antique rugs, Nazmiyal Rug Gallery is the best place to start. We have a vast collection of diverse antique carpets in different sizes and styles, and you can look through this amazing collection right here online. It's a convenient way for you to find the next centerpiece to your room or a new addition to your collection.In addition to displaying our extensive inventory of antique rugs, our website also contains useful information regarding these works of art for people who are new to this market. At Nazmiyal, we want all of our customers to feel like they are making a truly informed decision when it comes to purchasing antique Oriental rugs. You'll find a lot of information on our site regarding the history of antique Oriental carpets, maintenance guidelines and considerations to make when purchasing an antique carpet.If you would like to talk with one of the experts at Nazmiyal, please feel free to give us a call at 877 RUG FIND. They'll be able to guide you through our vast inventory of antique carpets and help you find the type of piece you're looking for more quickly. If you prefer, you can also contact us with your request by filling out the online form on the Contact Us page. We'll promptly respond to your email with the information you're looking for.

New York Rug Dealers Market & Nazmiyal

Oriental Rugs and carpets have always appeared as just that - a cultural product of the East with all the exotic associations that this conjures up. Initially one thinks of the weavers themselves working over their looms in the cities and towns of Persia or Turkey, and then the journey of the carpets into the commercial emporia or bazaars of such countries. The wonderful late nineteenth-century painting by Jean-Leon Gerome, “The Rug Merchant,” captures this exotic bygone age rather effectively. Even today travelers to Persia and Turkey can still attest to the vitality of the rug markets in places like Tabriz, Konya, Izmir, and, of course, Istanbul. But truth be told, no place in the Middle East can claim to be the center or capital of the international rug market nowadays, at least not in the realm of antique pieces. This title must go to London and even more to New York. The immediate reason for this is the presence there of major International auction houses with highly developed rug departments. Houses of this kind exist in Europe as well, but even they would yield pride of place New York and London if pressed.
What makes New York stand out especially is the existence of a very well and long established rug district in addition to the auction houses. The Oriental rug district in Manhattan is a world unto itself. Located primarily in the low 30’s between Park and Seventh Avenues, this area comprises a range of establishments. There are full-fledged ground-level stores as well as second-floor galleries that offer a more formal, secluded escape from the bustle of the street. But many other dealers numbering in the hundreds fill floor after floor in various office buildings throughout this district. Dealers of this latter type cater mostly to the trade and to one another. They do engage in retail sales, but one has to know antique Oriental carpets and their value rather well to buy from the office-building dealers, whose retail clients are mostly collectors. In any case, in Manhattan alone we are talking about inventories that collectively amount to many thousands of old and antique rugs. Add to this the various uptown dealers or galleries in the decorator district of the East Side in the 50’s, and it becomes clear that New York can offer access to an incredibly varied and extensive supply of antique Oriental carpets that is unparalleled anywhere else on the planet.
Within the rug world, this is certainly no secret. Dealers from allover constantly come to New to have access to its supply of rugs. Such visits tend to swell enormously when there are major auctions or special exhibitions of rugs. And New York is not only attractive to European dealers and collectors, but even to those from the Orient. It is well know that dealers from Central Asia, Iran, and Turkey flock to New York to acquire antique pieces from their home regions. The reason for this is that the supply of antique pieces in these areas has long since dried up owing to an endless, century-old demand in the West for Oriental carpets. So when you buy an antique carpet in Istanbul or anywhere else in Turkey or the Middle East, it may well be a piece that had spent much of its life in Europe or the United States!
There is certainly a lesson in this. The idea of acquiring a rug on a trip to the Middle East is a romantic holdover from European and American tourist practices going back to the nineteenth century or earlier. On a certain level we all want to experience something like Gerome’s painting when we buy a fine Oriental rug. It is certainly wonderful to travel to these places, but if your goal is to acquire an antique carpet for the best price, you might as invest in a less expensive trip to New York. If you live in or Near New York, you might as well stay at home and concentrate your resources entirely on the rug itself. And in truth you do not even have to travel at all.
Among the various New York rug dealers, Nazmiyal has a highly specialized and user-friendly website with an extensive inventory of antique pieces of every type, size, and style. An inventory of this range and quality is based on years of experience and effort in searching out the best pieces from sources all over the world. Nazmiyal is also a natural magnet that constantly attracts those interested in selling rugs. Even within the bustling New York rug market with its international contacts, Nazmiyal provides a major focal point or nexus, all of which is at the disposal of Nazmiyal’s clients, whether they are dealers, interior designers, or private retail customers. If you want an Oriental carpet, New York is the place to be, and within New York itself, the place to be is Nazmiyal. Visit us online or experience our collection firsthand in the spacious and relaxed setting of our Manhattan rug gallery.

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Nazmiyal Shawl On Exhibition at the New York Asia Society - The Arts of Kashmir

This past week, one of the most outstanding textiles in the Nazmiyal Collection, a splendid antique Kashmir shawl of the eighteenth century, went on display at New York’s Asia Society as part of a special exhibition, “The Arts of Kashmir.” This exhibition represents a major international effort involving loans from collections all over the world. It is the first major exhibition entirely devoted to the arts of Kashmir from late antiquity up to the present time, covering media of every kind.
The Nazmiyal shawl is a classic example of the so-called “Millefleurs” type, extremely fine in its detail and execution, and remarkably subtle in its design and use of color. The exhibition will be up until January 6, 2008. HOME ANTIQUE RUGS MODERN RUGS SERVICES CONTACT US RUG GUIDE WISHLISTNEWS & INFO RESOURCES ANTIQUE PERSIAN RUGS RETURN POLICY RUG SEARCHANTIQUE RUG DEALER NY GALLERY NJ RUG GALLERY & DEALER ANTIQUE OUSHAK TURKISH CARPETS TRIBAL OR NOMADIC RUGS ORIENTAL RUGS APPRAISALS