Notes on Salting Carpets

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The Salting Carpet

• Condition is often described as too good. People even experts often assume that they are newer then they are.
• Color is usually excellent but in shades not usually seen in Classical Persian Carpets. A non-Persian esthetic so to speak.
• Design is classical Persian of the late 16th century.
• Use of Ton Sur Ton especially pink on red.

George Salting

• Salting donated a collection of very important Carpets to the Victoria and Albert Museum.
• George Salting, formerly of 86 St. James's Street, London.
• Other art formerly in the Salting Collection

The rugs are very close to the Persian tradition except for color and the content of the poetry. This causes me to look to other forms of Islamic art in search of analogous examples. My conclusion is that the rugs are the product of the Uzbek occupation of Herat in the 1590s. Herat art turned to a different repertoire of colors that we see in traditional Persian art. The other major clue is found in the cartouches. Rather than lines from the Qur'an as we would expect in related carpets the Herati artists turned to Sufi influenced poetry|.

It is important to realize that carpets of this sort are designed by master artists of the court. The artists worked in the style set by their patron.

• The Salting Carpet
• Salting Type Prayer Rug
• Topkapi Carpets
• Oriental Rugs at The Philadelphia Museum of Art

Salting Type Prayer Rug

Oriental Carpet and Textile Studies: The Salting Carpets
by Murray L. Eiland (Editor), Robert Pinner (Editor)
Paperback: 136 pages
Publisher: International Conference on Oriental Carpets; (November 27, 1999)
ISBN: 188966605X

From the Publisher:

This compendium of academic sessions discusses a long-controversial subject for the origins of the so-called "Salting carpets" and makes an important contribution to settling the question.

"...serves to underline the importance of combining aesthetic and chromatic considerations with archival research...(Michael Frances') paper is painstakingly researched (with) and illustrated catalogue, structural analyses, C-14 dating and translations...of the inscriptions." Susan Day, HALI #110, May-June 2000, pp. 74-75.

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