Private Air New York

www.privateairny.com Private Air | Summer 2020 89 THE COLLECTION FROM TOP: Persian Ferahan Sarouk area rug, 3rd quarter, 19th century, offers a grand, organically shaped medallion and animated florals. Over 150 years old, this very rare double medallion carpet is highly collectible, capturing Ferahan artistry at its finest—grand, whimsical, elegant, and asymmetric simultaneously. The color striation in the pomegranate field is extraordinary and the unique border of lily pairings add scale and fluidity to the field. softened by uncanny realism, stately medallions bedecked with constant tiny nuances, and extraordinary finesses of weave. e very best of these carpets from the Persian Ferahan plain over time came to be recognized by connoisseurs worldwide for their inimitable presence, both regal and expressive. Starting in the 1500s, Persia's Safavid dynasty had subsidized carpet ateliers that created splendiferous rugs with never-seen- before curvilinear designs of ornate florals and vinery meant to express utter perfection, the zenith of beauty. Many were of great size, blanketing royal palaces and courtiers' homes, while the rest were used as gifts of state or sold to foreign aristocracy. With the dynasty's fall in 1736, the royal ateliers closed, marking the end of what came to be known as "e Golden Age of Persian Weaving." Yet, within the following few decades, on northern Persia's vast Ferahan plain, abundant in water sources and unusually rich grazing land, a new weaving aesthetic evolved. Populated by a loose rug-making consortium of large and small villages, this district supplied local markets with their varied traditional handcrafts concurrently to the royal carpet production. is bevy of carpet weaving attracted its share of the dismissed artisans from the Shah's workshops who retained the intellectual property that had created the Safavid excellence, notably Armenians weavers and merchants joined their relatives and contacts on this verdant terrain. Employing the Safavid floral curvilinear aesthetic as a model, but unbound by its rigorous formal patterns and the mandate of "Absolute Perfection," Ferahan weavers experimented with creating more naturalistic-looking garden motifs and changing the perfect curves of the Safavid rugs to somewhat more angular ones. Ferahan rugs include individualized flowers, tendrils and vines tilting at charming angles, often so delicate that they appear to be hand-drawn. A distinguishing aspect of this visionary carpet style is how the main borders reflect the rhythms and expressiveness seen in the rug's interior portion, a departure from other rug categories that used borders as ornate frames. "Ferahan rugs introduced spontaneity, an improvisational latitude that yielded seemingly infinite permutations," notes

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