The Rug Library

The floral style of the Met's lattice-and-blossom carpet fragments is typical of Shah Jahan's taste, also seen in the architectural ornament and manuscript illumination of his reign.

Millefleur patterns were combined with other layouts; museum titles include a pashmina carpet with a gateway-and-millefleur design and a millefleur carpet with a flower-and-trellis design.

Millefleur, meaning 'thousand flowers', describes carpets whose patterns are entirely floral and built from a profusion of tiny blossom clusters, a style that developed within later Mughal floral design.

A Met Museum millefleur carpet shows densely arranged flowers on a red ground, including lotus flowers drawn at different stages of blooming in a distinctly Indian style; scholars have not agreed on its date, though details suggest the 18th century.

Millefleur Indian rugs are generally placed between the second half of the 17th century and about 1800, and many had pile of pashmina, the fine undercoat of Himalayan mountain goats.

During Jahangir's reign (1605–27), Mughal decorative arts took on far more floral imagery; this is often linked to the flower-filled valleys he saw on a visit to Kashmir in 1620.

A Met carpet from Kashmir or Lahore, about 1650, shows irises, tulips and other flowering plants drawn with carefully shaded leaves, as naturalistically as the knotted medium allowed.

Britannica notes that Mughal floral carpets often use trailing blossoms such as wisteria, or long bunches of grapes.

Mughal prayer rugs with a central flowering plant can have about 2,000 knots per square inch, and a lattice fragment in the Textile Museum, Washington, D.C., exceeds 2,500.

Indian craftspeople adapted the buta to local flowers such as marigold (genda), lotus (kamal) and rose (gulab), while royal textiles often showed non-native tulips, irises and poppies.

Jahangir's court painter Mansur made precise botanical studies, and flowers of the Jahangir and Shah Jahan era also appear in pietra dura, murals, embroidery and jewellery.