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Carpets

1 to 12 of 14 Collection Info

Carpet

Date: 17th century or later

Accession Number: 1970.502

Carpet

Date: mid-16th century

Accession Number: 61.939

Dragon carpet (fragmentary)

Date: about 1700

Accession Number: 64.2101

Hunting carpet

Aqa Mirak and Sultan Muhammad

Date: about 1530

Accession Number: 66.293

Indo-Persian carpet

Date: 17th century

Accession Number: 66.229

Medallion carpet

Date: late 15th–early 16th century

Accession Number: 65.595

Pictorial carpet

Date: about 1590–1600

Accession Number: 93.1480

Pillar rug

Date: late 19th century

Accession Number: 24.93

Polonaise carpet

Date: probably early 17th century

Accession Number: 17.603

Rug

Date: early 19th century

Accession Number: 09.359

Rug

Ilums Bolighus (Danish department store)

Date: about 1960–65

Accession Number: 2001.681

Rug

Date: 1850-1900

Accession Number: 2016.165

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Collection Info

Carpets

Rugs were first collected at the MFA as examples of “fine ornament” intended to inspire and train American designers and manufacturers. Early donations from Denman Waldo Ross, a design professor at Harvard University, leaned heavily toward “classical” carpets from the courts of Safavid Iran and Mughal India, and joined an earlier acquisition of a 17th-century Mughal pictorial carpet, gifted by F. L. Ames in 1893. Subsequent collecting resulted in the addition of the Holbein Carpet, the Medallion Carpet, and the extraordinary 16th-century Safavid Hunting Carpet, a donation from collector John Goelet. The holdings were later enriched by gifts that reflected particularly New England tastes: Caucasian carpets and Turkmen, mainly Tekke, carpets. Largely ignored, however, were tribal carpets and flat weave (kilims). Later collecting efforts have sought to address these gaps; the Museum has recently acquired Persian (Luri) flatweave and Kazak carpets, as well as a 1960s Danish modern riyya rug and a 1980s carpet, designed by the Memphis Design Group, that extend the collection into the late 20th century.