Reflections on a symposium dedicated to textile arts of the East

By Susan Scollay

Blog musing – 7 July 2020

Reflecting on the past months of enforced isolation and the disruption to our usual work patterns, some of us will agree with claims that many scholars have used their time in seclusion productively — researching articles and writing books that will begin to emerge by the end of the year. Writing in The Art Newspaper on 4 May 2020, Bendor Grosvenor argued that being an art historian is easier now and is a more productive pursuit than ever before.  ‘Previous generations,’ he wrote, ‘would take weeks to gather in multiple libraries and archives, what now can be easily accessed’ from remote places throughout the world. Of course, art historians need to SEE art on a regular basis, but this was now taken care of, claimed Grosvenor, by the proliferation of collections on-line. Agreed — but perhaps what some of us have most missed are the opportunities to get together in person for reading groups and seminars — as well as the kind of major conferences that have been cancelled for the time being and maybe longer.   By that I mean the kind of conferences that draw international scholars because of the quality of their academic programmes and which are accompanied by special exhibitions, as well as opportunities to see works of art that are usually out of bounds to the general public. These latter can lead to multi-faceted connections and possibly to articles and books comparable to those that we can look forward to at the end of these unprecedented months of 2020.

Exactly a year ago, the Courtauld Institute and the National Gallery in London hosted a two-day symposium dedicated to the textile arts of the East. The two major themes were new research on textiles, costume and carpets produced between 1400 and 1700 and a whole day devoted to ‘making the past present’ – collecting and collections of textiles. Several speakers touched on the ever-evolving topic of oriental carpets in European paintings, a genre of which the National Gallery holds an impressive number of outstanding works. The academic presentations included excellent papers from Dr Moya Carey, of the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, exploring the relationship between the politics, architecture and textiles of the Safavid Dynasty in Iran (1501–1736); University of Oxford doctoral candidate, Fuchsia Hart, presenting an exquisite and previously unknown seventeenth century, twelve-sided carpet from the mausoleum of Shah Abbas II (r. 1642–66) in Qom, Iran; and Dr Jon Thompson, the former May Beattie fellow at the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, on the perception of colour in textiles. Elegantly formulated, as ever, this presentation was likely Dr Thompson’s last major conference before his death early this year.  Anna Beselin, senior conservator at the Museum for Islamic Art in Berlin, highlighted new developments in textile analysis and conservation that assist in pin-pointing the origins of some of the puzzling historic textiles that have continued to elude scholarly classification.     

For the rest of the week, which was organised in honour of the 40-year anniversary of HALI and its issue number 200, conference delegates enjoyed a series of workshops, films, exhibitions and visits to collections of rarely-seen textiles. These included some fine examples in private hands as well as the wonders of the textile store-rooms of the Victoria and Albert Museum – in the process of moving from the historic Clothworkers’ Centre, Blythe House, in Kensington to purpose-built accommodation constructed on the site of the 2012 Olympics in north-east London.  

On a personal level, I was privileged to be part of a small group able to view the renowned, but rarely-seen, ‘Girdlers' Carpet’, sometimes described as the ‘Bell Carpet.’ This significant example of seventeenth century woven art is part of the collection of a medieval livery company, the Worshipful Company of Girdlers (belt makers) and hangs under glass in the Livery Hall at their elegant premises in East London. It is the only known classical Indian carpet whose place and date of manufacture is securely documented – a rarity in the corpus of historic carpets woven in the Islamic world. Commissioned in 1630 in the imperial city of Lahore, during the era of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58), the carpet was delivered to the Girdlers’ on the 12th August, 1634. The donor was Robert Bell (1564–1637), a past Master of the Girdlers’ and a prominent member of the East India Company, founded in 1604.  

 The technical details of the Girdlers’ Carpet noted before it was mounted under glass for hanging, are very similar to those of the Trinitarias Carpet, in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), in Melbourne. The Trinitarias is a magnificent work — measuring 10.44 x 3.36 metres, with a bold design and superb, saturated colour. It was purchased by the NGV in 1958 with funds from the Felton Bequest, and was understood at the time to be a work of sixteenth or seventeenth century Persian origin. Since its acquisition, the Trinitarias has mostly remained in storage and has been seldom exhibited.  In 2010, after technical analysis, chemical testing of its dyes and carbon-14 dating, the NGV confirmed its date of production as the first half of the seventeenth century, and reattributed the carpet to northern India under Mughal rule, with its likely city of origin as Lahore. This reattribution brought the NGV in line with international institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MMA), New York, who have recently carried out similar rigorous reappraisals of textiles and carpets in their collections.      

Image 1. Detail: The Trinitarias Carpet, wool and cotton, 10.44 x 3.36 m. India, first half 17th century, National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest. Photo: courtesy NGV.  

Image 2. Detail: showing flower cluster motif characteristic of Lahore carpets, The Trinitarias Carpet, wool and cotton, 10.44 x 3.36 m. India, first half 17th century, NGV, Felton Bequest. Photo: Susan Scollay. 

The attribution to Lahore for both the Girdlers’ Carpet and the Trinitarias is based on a number of technical details and design characteristics previously mentioned in publications by the late John Irwin of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A) and Daniel Walker, a former curator at the MMA.  On close inspection, a noticeable feature of the Girdlers’ Carpet is a delicate motif, repeated throughout, that resembles a stylised flower cluster, a raceme – in this case rather like a wisteria bloom. It is, according to the late John Irwin, writing in 1962, ‘a lanceolate-leaf, here made to resemble a Wistaria (sic) flower’ and ‘borrowed from long-established Persian carpet tradition.’ Irwin argued that Mughal designers and weavers would not have conceived of the true origin of the motif in its traditional, stylised Persian form and, being interested in natural flower drawings, they adapted it accordingly. Whatever its origins, according to John Irwin, Daniel Walker and Dr Steven Cohen, who accompanied the group to the view the Girdlers’ Carpet, the flower cluster motif is an acknowledged characteristic of historic Lahore weaving. The Trinitarias is replete with the intriguing wisteria-like, flower cluster linked to Lahore, but any comparison with the Girdlers’ Carpet has not been previously mentioned in relation to the likely origins of the Trinitarias.

Accordingly, my isolation weeks’ article, ‘New Perspectives on the Trinitarias Carpet in the collection of the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne’ will be published in the September issue of The Asian Arts Society of Australia (TAASA) Review. Professor Samer Akkach of the University of Adelaide is the guest editor of this special issue, dedicated to the Arts of Islam.