Code: MOG70
Age: ~1850
Size: 110x250cm
Size (ft): 3'7"x8'2"
Structure: wool pile, ivory wool warps and ivory wool wefts.
Knots: Gördes (Turkish, symmetrical)
Condition: The pile remains very good throughout, with corroded blacks. The presence of rare early natural dye tones, including old purple, dark teal green, cinnamon, light sage green - points to a pre-commercial production phase.
Description: In this example, the so-called “crab” motif, which is primarily used as a main border design in carpets woven across almost all regions of Azerbaijan, has been employed in the central field. These pieces form a relatively rare, small group, and carpets with this design are not common. They were woven in different regions, including Mughan, Karabagh, Ganja, and various districts of Gazakh. Prayer-format examples also exist, mostly from Karabagh.
For comparative reference, among the known examples (CF):
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This example was formerly in the late Jim Dixon collection and was offered for sale a few years ago. Although it has been dated to the 1880s, it is at least two decades earlier. Most probably it was made somewhere in Karabagh or Ganja.  |
Further comparative
material includes examples from the market record. In
comparison, one piece was offered at a well-known New York auction
in 2002, where it sold for $8,365. It is dated to the 1870s–1880s
and was likely woven in districts of Mughan close to Karabagh.
An almost identical example was sold at Rippon Boswell in 2003 for
€13,500. This piece was published as plate 143 in Eva Engelhardt’s
Teppiche: Die Bilder des
Orients I (1977). |
Further supporting this group, another example was offered at the Rippon Boswell auction in Germany in 2009, where it sold for €12,200. It is likewise a Mughan carpet and is dated to the 1860s–1870s.  |
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Continuing the sequence of recorded sales, another related example was offered at Sotheby’s New York on 31 January 2014, where it realized $10,625. The same carpet had previously appeared at Sotheby’s New York on 10 December 1992, lot 91, indicating a repeated market presence.  |
In addition, another example was exhibited in Graz in the “2001 Nights” exhibition by Reinisch and Albegger, where it was shown as plate 188 (ILA collection), further confirming the typology within curated scholarly presentations.  |
Finally, the most recent comparable example to be noted here
was also offered at Sotheby’s New York in 2008, with an estimate
of $8,000–12,000.  |
The present example is likely to predate all of the comparative material discussed above.
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