The loss of the European markets in the eighteenth century certainly
affected rug production throughout the Middle East, but it was not the only
adverse factor in this process. The decline of Ottoman power stimulated an
interest in western styles and tastes among the Turkish elite which weakened
official artistic production, including textiles and carpets. During the
eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries the major rug workshops fell off
in quality and quantity, with most authentic Turkish weaving shifting now to
popular, village production, which at that time could no longer compete for
any sophisticated European buyers who might still provide a market. In
Persia, the Safavid Dynasty was overturned by an Afghan invasion in 1722,
which dealt a serious blow to high level artistic patronage and production,
reducing rug weaving all across the region to a shadow of its former
greatness, both in the quality of the designs and in the extent of
manufacture. Rug production would not recover until circumstances changed in
the West and the Middle East as well.
In Persia a decisive factor was the emergence of the Qajar Dynasty.
Although Qajar art reflected the tide of western influence in
costume and elite décor, much the same as contemporary late Ottoman art in
Turkey, the Qajars also fostered a program of cultural revival that
encouraged traditional crafts like rug production. This coincided with the
emergence in the West of a large new middle class with considerable buying
power. In a period of colonialist expansion across the Middle East and much
of the world, European and American clients re-acquired a taste for
the exotic refinement of the Oriental carpet as it once again began to
become accessible, and as commercial ties between East and West intensified.
Soon European importers established headquarters in the new Persian
centers of production, and they began to influence the style and quality of
the rugs to make them more attractive to western clients.
This period, especially in the latter part of the nineteenth century,
witnessed a revival of Persian rug production that often equaled or at least came
close to the great carpets of the classical era, and in terms of quantity,
it far exceeded the production of earlier times. Almost immediately, rug
weavers all across Late Ottoman Turkey began to compete as well for the new
western market. At the same time weaving in the Caucasus expanded enormously
under official Czarist Russian control. Not to be outdone, colonial British
authorities in India began to revive rug production there as well. In China
it took a bit longer, but the period after the First World War and the
collapse of the Manchu Dynasty witnessed a marked expansion of rug
production geared toward western markets. This virtual explosion in
production helps to explain why most antique carpets that one encounters
nowadays were made in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The
Oriental rug revival and its impact on the West was in fact so intense and
so lasting, that for the first time since the seventeenth century, European
weavers, especially in the British Isles, began imitating the design and
technique of rugs from the Middle East.
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Zeigler Sultanabad from Nazmiyal Collection rug # 3382
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