A Karapinar carpet fragment, Central Anatolia,

"The View from Above," Hali, issue 134, May-June 2004, p. 45

An intriguing and striking feature of this carpet fragment is the yellow punctuated half oval, filled with red hooked motifs, that forms an arch above the medallion.  This is an unusual design element that seems to be shared with only three other published rugs; one in the Ballard collection, see Hali, issue 124, p. 105, a rug sold at Rippon-Boswell, Wiesbaden, 17 May 2003, lot 71 and another sold at Skinner’s, Bolton, 16 December 1986, lot 102.  These three examples are complete rugs with each having a full yellow ovoid framing its medallion.  It is very likely that the half oval at the top in this fragment would have been complemented by a similar one beneath the medallion, forming a truncated but more complete oval.  In the three cited pieces, the upper and lower elements of the ogival form are cut off by the border, while in the fragment here, the upper end is complete and contained within the field.  It is possible that this oval design element is an adaptation of the ogival repeat patterns found in Ottoman velvets and brocades and this does appear to be the case with the cited examples.  The carpet offered here, however, may also reflect an interpretation of a court carpet design where an ovoid band punctuated by palmettes surrounds a lobed medallion such as that on the small silk Kashan rug in the Bavarian National Museum, see Erdmann, Kurt, Seven Hundred Years of Oriental Carpets, London, 1970, fig. 61, p. 61.

The absence of outlines between colours and a stylization in the rendering of floral elements, all having a ribbon-like character to their drawing, are characteristics of Karapinar pile weavings as first identified by May Beattie in her 1976 article, “Some Rugs of the Konya Region,” Oriental Art, volume XXII, no. 1, pp. 60-76.  Found in this fragment, these elements are shared with the examples cited above and two Karapinar weavings more recently on the market such as the Foy Casper carpet and Bernheimer-Wher carpet fragment, see Thompson, Jon, Milestones in the History of Carpets, Milan 2006, pl. 24 and fig. 188, and Brunk Auctions, Asheville, NC, 31 May 2003, lot 57 and Sotheby’s New York, 16 December 2004, lot 55 respectively.   The medallion enclosing diagonally placed and attenuated tulips in the fragment offered here is also found in two Karapinar rugs in museum collections, that in the Berlin Museum of Islamic Art, see Spuhler, F., Oriental Carpets in the Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin, London 1987, pl. 24, p. 167 and the ‘Cantoni’ rug in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, see Hali, issue 29, p. 50.