A Mughal carpet, Lahore,

Lady Olive Baillie - Leeds Castle, Kent

Leeds Castle Foundation, Kent

This magnificent Mughal carpet is from the collection of Leeds Castle in Kent, one of the most beautiful and significant of English castles, built before the Norman Conquest of the eleventh century. The long and glorious history of the castle has always been entwined with that of English royalty. From Edward I to Henry V, kings have bestowed the castle upon their queens. Henry VIII bequeathed Leeds Castle to a loyal servant and the great house remained as the property of the English aristocracy until 1924 when heavy death duties obliged the Wykeham Martin family to sell the family seat.

The castle was bought by an Anglo-American, the Hon. Mrs. Olive Wilson-Filmer (later Lady Baillie), the daughter of Lord Queensborough and his American wife, a member of the Whitney family.  Lady Baillie restored the castle with characteristic imagination and vigour.  Having grown up in France she turned to Stéphane Boudin, the foremost French decorator of his generation.  Boudin's work was essentially international in its appeal, being French in inspiration and approach and carried out for clients with international backgrounds and fortunes.  For thirty years they decorated and embellished the castle, stripping away incongruous additions and refining interiors. The placement of a seventeenth century Mughal Indian weaving in a thirteen century English interior decorated in the French manner was a quintessential example of Boudin’s Internationalist design and Lady Baillie’s approach to recreating an historic interior.    

The carpet is a member of a select group of Mughal weavings depicting flowering plants drawn with exceptional botanical realism.  Some comparable naturalistic renderings of plants are depicted in contemporaneous Indian paintings and architecture. (See Skelton, Robert, A decorative motif in Moghul art, Aspects of Indian Art, Los Angeles, 1972, p. 147).  The vogue for such designs was influenced by the popularity of European herbaria in India during the reign of Jahangir (1605-1628) and developed during the rule of his grandson Shah Jahan (1628-1658). Similar renditions of lilies, tulips and roses appear on contemporaneous carpets such as one previously in the collection of the Maharaja of Jaipur, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv.no.1970.321) see: Walker, Daniel, Flowers Underfoot, Indian Carpets of The Mughal Era, New York, 1997, no. 22. pp.96-7, figs.93-4. 

Although the Baillie carpet was re-configured at some point, the placement of some plants at slight angles outside of the strict horizontal rows typical of such carpets would suggest that it was originally a shaped carpet.  The carpet was recently examined by Dr. Hans Sindermann and his analysis of the inserts suggests that the two larger fragments in the lower central portion of the field were originally positioned immediately above this, in the gap which would be created by undoing the present central seam.  Reconfiguring the carpet in this way would result in a width of approximately 430cm., which is consistent with the proportions of other shaped carpets. For examples of related Mughal shaped carpets see: Carpets from the J Paul Getty Museum, Sotheby’s New York, 8 December 1990, lots 7 and 8.  According to Daniel Walker, Flowers Underfoot (op. cit.) p.104, the unusual structure of the present carpet with its warps of ivory cotton and wefts of crimson silk is a technical oddity particular to this small subgroup of shaped carpets. The original usage of such carpets is unknown but they were generally made in pairs as with the Getty carpets and were probably woven for the Maharajas of Jaipur and Amber for the spectacular encampments of their peripatetic courts.