The Rug Library

Persian garden carpets combine a bird's-eye view of the classic four-part garden, or chahar bagh, with birds and trees shown in profile.

The Jaipur garden carpet shows a chahar bagh with a central tank surrounded by animals catching fish, with streams dividing the garden into plots worked in five colours.

On one celebrated Mughal single-plant rug in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, half-cypress trees frame the niche instead of architectural columns.

The cloud band is a wavy, ribbon-like stylisation of a cloud from Chinese art, in use since at least the Han period, that later became common in Persian and other oriental rugs.

Garden and hunting themes supply many carpet motifs, including songbirds such as the nightingale, peacocks, lions, cheetahs and deer, as well as Chinese dragons and qilin.

The buta takes its name from the Persian boteh, meaning shrub or flowering plant; in India it has been used since at least the 16th century, mainly on Kashmiri shawls popular with the Mughals.

The badaam ('almond') motif, similar in shape to the boteh and kairi, is linked with the Kashmir Valley, where it developed after the Mughals arrived in the 16th century.

Britannica notes that mounted huntsmen are the most common human figures on carpets, though musicians also appear.

Motifs on Indo-Persian carpets include palmettes with 'open' centres and cypress trees alternating with palmettes in the border, each cypress flanked by sprays of tiny blossoms.

Besides geometric forms, Navalgund dhurries of Karnataka include motifs such as the peacock (mor or navilu) and pagadi aata, a traditional Indian dice game.

The Wagner Garden Carpet's design stresses movement, with branches swaying, water flowing, and animals leaping or in flight among cypress and plane trees.

According to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, relatively few carpets appear to have been made in India before the reign of Akbar (r. 1556–1605), whose court historians record royal carpet workshops at Fatehpur Sikri, Lahore and Agra.

In the later 17th century, European engravings and illustrated books circulating at the Mughal court influenced carpet patterns, and a distinctly Mughal way of depicting flowers emerged that differed from the Persian manner.

Alongside Persian-style designs, Mughal weavers developed distinctively Indian carpet types, including scenic and landscape carpets, animal carpets with chase scenes, architectural latticework designs and prayer rugs centred on a single flowering plant.

Pashmina, the fine underbelly hair of the Kashmir goat used for Kashmir shawls, was preferred over silk for the pile of the finest Mughal carpets in the 17th and 18th centuries, giving them a velvety surface.

Britannica notes that fine Mughal carpets often have warps in bands of contrasting colours and a pile of wool so fine it is sometimes mistaken for silk, with some of the tightest knotting among antique Oriental carpets.

Mughal floral carpet designs commonly feature trailing blossoms such as wisteria and elongated bunches of grapes, according to Britannica.

Mughal karkhanas, or imperial workshops, served the needs of the court and were located at Lahore, Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Ahmedabad, with artisans often trained by masters from Persia or Central Asia.

Under Jahangir, botanical and animal motifs grew in popularity in Mughal art, and the vogue for botanically accurate floral carpet designs reached its peak under Shah Jahan.

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.