A Yomud C-gul main carpet, West Turkestan,

The C-gul ornament is an archaic motif found not only on main carpets of the Turkoman Yomud tribe, but also on a variety of textiles and ceramic objects produced throughout Anatolia and parts of the Caucasus. Because of the half-moon shapes enclosed in the gul, these ornaments are also often referred to as ‘Moon-guls.’ One of the most beautiful and well-known examples of a carpet decorated with such ornament is an eighteenth-century multiple-gul carpet from the Ballard Collection, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, see Thompson, Jon and Louise W. Mackie ed., Turkmen Tribal Carpets and Traditions,  Washington D.C., 1980, pl. 62. Other examples of a Yomud main carpet with the C-gul design are in the Wiedersperg Collection in the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco, see Pinner, Robert and Murray L. Eiland, Between the Black Desert and the Red, San Francisco, 1999, pls. 31 and 32.

In his article on C-gul carpets, Hans Sienknecht divides these weavings into four groups, see Sienknecht, Hans, “A Turkic Heritage,” Hali, issue 47, pp. 30-39. According to his classification, the present lot belongs to Group IV with its C-guls being arranged in offset diagonal rows by way of colour change.  A similar C-gul carpet with diagonal rows is in the Textile Museum in Washington D.C., see Thompson and Mackie, op. cit., pl. 64. The design of the lot offered here is executed harmoniously by simplifying the individual design of the hexagonal guls. In this case the alternating colours of the diagonal rows not only tie the design together, but also help to differentiate the guls. The concept of this diagonal arrangement of guls is very old. For an eighteenth-century example of an early carpet with diagonal design from the collection of Mr. and Mrs. Joseph W. Fell see Thompson and Mackie, op. cit., pl. 63. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the original octagonal C-guls had morphed into hexagonal ones that are better suited for diagonal arrangement as in the lot offered here. The present carpet is framed by a white-ground running-dog border that provides the piece with a bold frame. Each end has a different design; one is decorated with rows of colourful hooked-guls, the other shows unusual ascending stylized branches, which add an intriguing feature to the carpet. A similar carpet with octagonal guls and a ‘boat border’ was sold at Sotheby’s, New York, December 2, 2003, lot 61. For further discussion on C-gul carpets see Sienknecht, Hans, op.cit. pp. 30-39, and Pinner, Robert and Murray L. Eiland, op.cit., pp. 56-59.