The Rug Library

The Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin staged an exhibition of about 22 Mughal-era paintings showing how carpets were used at court.

The Calico Museum of Textiles in Ahmedabad was founded in 1949 by Gautam Sarabhai and his sister Gira Sarabhai and was inaugurated by Jawaharlal Nehru.

The V&A holds a group of mid-17th-century Mughal carpet fragments with a tree-and-flower design, woven with a pashmina pile on a silk foundation of warps and wefts.

A large part of the Mughal carpet from which the V&A’s pashmina fragments were cut is now in the Frick Collection, New York, and it too is pieced together from fragments.

The Frick Collection’s two Mughal carpets date from the reign of Shah Jahan (1628–58) and were probably woven in the royal workshops at Lahore; each was assembled from fragments of larger carpets in the 19th century to satisfy collectors.

A pashmina carpet at the Met shows a pair of cypress trees beneath an arch, a composition read as a gateway to a flower-filled paradise, with a geometric millefleur field growing from a central vase.

A red-ground 'millefleur' carpet at the Met is densely covered with formally arranged flowers; its lotus blossoms shown in different stages of growth are considered distinctly Indian, and details suggest an 18th-century date.

The Met’s publication 'Flowers Underfoot: Indian Carpets of the Mughal Era' (Daniel Walker) presents more than fifty carpets made of cotton, wool, silk and pashmina.

The Calico Museum’s collection of Indian hand-made and industrial textiles spans roughly the 15th to the 20th centuries and includes Mughal carpets.

In 1982 the Calico Museum moved to 'The Retreat', the Sarabhai family estate in Ahmedabad, where it is housed in the Sarabhai haveli and its gardens.

Harvard Art Museums hold a Mughal-style 'Pashmina Carpet with Niche Design and Millefleur Pattern', an example of the flower-filled niche rugs associated with northern India.

The Museum of Islamic Art in Doha holds an Indian silk carpet with an ashtapada (chessboard-like) design, the subject of a published scholarly study.

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford lists a 'Mughal carpet with floral pattern' in the online collection of its Jameel Centre for Islamic and Asian art.

The Frick Collection’s smaller Mughal carpet, with long-stemmed flowers of several kinds, was bought by the dealer Duveen from Baron Maurice de Rothschild; the larger one is decorated with rows of trees.

The Frick’s two Mughal carpets were shown after conservation in the 2006 installation 'Gardens of Eternal Spring: Two Newly Conserved Mughal Carpets'.

The Sarabhai haveli that houses the Calico Museum is set in formal gardens with water features designed in the 1930s by Surendranath Kar of Santiniketan.