A Sultanabad carpet, West Persia

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This large carpet from the Sultanabad district (present day Arak, Iran), is the type of carpet which the firm of Ziegler and Co. would have imported into the UK in their early years of trading in Iran. The renewed interest in 'Oriental' carpets in Europe in the second half of the 19th century was partly stimulated by the decorative ideals of  the Arts and Crafts movement, and partly by their appearance as models of 'good taste' in the new museums of decorative arts being established in Europe, such as the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria & Albert Museum).  Persia provided attractive opportunities for profitable trade and Ziegler and Co., a Manchester based Anglo-Swiss firm, originally traders in cotton goods, established in 1867, is the “earliest known foreign enterprise to have directly participated in the investment and consolidation of the Iranian carpet industry. Through their purchase of a factory in Sultanabad (now Arak) in 1881, Ziegler and Co. helped to organize […] the mass manufacture of carpets, as well as rapidly expanding local industry by providing models of production. In 1870, there were only around forty looms in operation in Sultanabad. By the 1880s, a few thousand looms were in operation in and around the town, with Ziegler’s supplying about four thousand carpets every year to Europe in the late nineteenth century.” (Jackson, Cailah, ‘Persian Carpets and the South Kensington Museum: Design, Scholarship and Collecting in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain‘, Journal of Design History, Oxford, September 2016, p. 8).