A George III carpet, after a design by Robert Adam, Axminster, England,

Boscobel Restoration, Inc., Garrison-on-the Hudson, New York, sold Sotheby's New York, 16 December 1993, lot 253

Ohan Berberyan, sold Parke-Bernet Galleries, New York, 28 January 1960, lot 63

Phillips of Hitchin, Herts.

Marcel Esnaulst, Chateau-sur-Creuse, Aubusson 

Rose, Brenda, 'Early Axminster Carpets', Hali, Issue 120, p. 98, no. 9

Day, Susan et. al., Great Carpets of the World, Paris, 1996, p. 292, fig. 282

According to Rose, op. cit. this design is known as the 'Lansdowne' style after a neo-classical carpet designed by Robert Adam (1728-1792) in 1769 to complement the drawing room at Lansdowne House, built in London by Adam in the early 1760s for the Earl of Bute, then William Fitzmaurice, the Earl of Sherburne and Marquis of Lansdowne. When the house was demolished in 1929 the drawing room was acquired by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the dining room by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.  For a photograph of the reconstruction of the Lansdowne drawing room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, see; Day, op. cit., p. 293, fig. 283. 

The original carpets were designed to echo and complement Adam's magnificent neo-classical ceilings and displayed rectangular end panels flanking a central square section with baskets and sprays of roses surrounding a circular centrepiece.  Of the six extant carpets, only three still have their end panels and the other three (including this one) have probably been reduced in size at some point although Rose, op. cit. argues that they may have been intentionally woven in a 'square'-format.  Adam's reliance on classical proportions would make this unlikely unless each square carpet was to be flanked by a pair of narrower complementary carpets. The other five 'Lansdowne' carpets are: a light blue ground 'square'  format carpet formerly in the Manor House, Spexhall, Suffolk, see: Phillips London, 16 October 2001, lot 214, two other deep blue ground carpets, one in the Lansdowne Room in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the other in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and two pastel ground carpets in the Victoria and Albert Museum, see Jacobs, Bertram, Axminster Carpets, Leigh-on-Sea, 1970, pls. 52, 53, 54 and 55 and Sherrill, Sarah B., Carpets and Rugs of Europe and America, New York, 1996, p. 204, pl. 222.   

So successful was Adam's design, that it was paid the ultimate compliment of being copied by 18th century French designers such as François-Joseph Belanger who visited Lansdowne House in 1767 and designed a remarkably similar carpet for the Duchess of Mazarin in 1777, see: Sherrill, ibid, p. 87, pl. 94.