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.