Object details
Object number
T26c1
Creator(s)
Persian, Herat
Title
Carpet
Date
17th century
Medium
Wool pile on cotton foundation, 121 knots per square inch
Dimensions
784.9 x 370.2 cm (309 x 145 3/4 in.)
Provenance
Purchased by Isabella Stewart Gardner from Benguiat Brothers, London, for £350 on 21 July 1894, on the recommendation of John Singer Sargent.
Commentary
Probably dating from the seventeenth century, this Persian (Safavid Isfahan) court carpet fills one of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's most celebrated spaces.It depicts a two-layer arabesque of palmettes, vines, and curved leaves on a dark maroon ground surrounded by a border of palmettes and flowers on dark blue. This kind of design suggests a date in the seventeenth century. It originates in the Persian court workshops, which produced similar designs for textiles, stone-carvings, ceramics and manuscript illuminations. Here it sets the stage for Titian's famous painting of Europa and provides the backdrop for a group of rococo armchairs made for Palazzo Borghese, Rome. Isabella Stewart Gardner purchased this magnificent carpet from Benguiat Brothers, London, for £350 on 21 July 1894, on the recommendation of her friend, the painter John Singer Sargent. He had tried unsuccessfully to make this carpet the background of his full-length portrait of Ada Rehan but, according to Sargent, "The picture... never came off. Whenever I put my model [Rehan] on it, she covered up something infinitely more beautiful than herself, so I gave it up and did a sort of map of the carpet for a pattern". Instead Gardner brought it back to Boston, eventually making it a defining feature of her museum's Titian Room.
Bibliography
Catalogue. Fenway Court. (Boston, 1903), p. 19. (as "a long Persian carpet")
Morris Carter. Isabella Stewart Gardner and Fenway Court. Boston, 1925, p. 145. (16th-century Ispahan, bought on the recommendation of John Singer Sagent and used by him as a background in his 1894 portrait of the Irish actress Ada Rehan (1860-1916))
Gilbert Wendel Longstreet and Morris Carter. General Catalogue (Boston, 1935), p. 230. (16th-century, Persian, Ispahan)
“Notes, Records, Comments.” Gardner Museum Calendar of Events 6, no. 1 (2 Sept. 1962), pp. 1-2. (16th-century, Persian, Ispahan)
“Notes, Records, Comments.” Gardner Museum Calendar of Events 8, no. 35 (2 May 1965), p. 2. (16th-century, Persian, Ispahan, made East Persia, region of Herat and Sabzawar, description of pattern)
Walter Denny. "Some Islamic Objects in the Gardner Museum." Fenway Court (1971), pp. 12-15. (a "court carpet", Persian (Herat or Isfahan) or Indian, 17th-century)
Yasuko Horioka, Marylin Rhie and Walter B. Denny. Oriental and Islamic Art. Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Boston,1975, pp.134-35. (Persian or Indian, 17th-century)
John Sweetman. The Oriental Obsession: Islamic Inspiration in British and American Art and Architecture 1500-1920 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 226-27, 296 40n, fig. 139. (as evidence of Sargent's interest in Persian carpets)
Richard Ormond and and Elaine Kilmurray. John Singer Sargent: Portraits of the 1890s (New Haven and London, 2002), no. 308, p. 92. (Sargent's portrait of Rehan, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 40.146).
Cynthia Saltzman. Old Masters, New World: America’s Raid on Europe’s Great Pictures (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 90.
Daniela Cecutto. Una miniera inesauribile: Collezionisti e antiquairi di arte islamica L'Italia e il contesto internazionale tra Ottocento e Novecento. Exh. cat. (Florence: Museo Stefano Bardini, 2012). p. 205, 264, no. 27. (as Persia or India, 16th century)
Benedict Cuddon. "A Field Pioneered by Amateurs: The Collecting and Display of Islamic Art in Early Twentieth-Century Boston." Muqarnas (2013), p. 18.
Richard Ormond in Richard Ormond (ed.). Sargent: Portraits of Artists and Friends. Exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2015), p. 194 (as the original background for Sargent's portrait of Ada Rehan)
Gallery
Titian Room
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