A courtly figural silk and two colour velvet panel, 
Safavid Iran, circa 1600, the silk surround,...

Published:
'A Tale of Three Velvets', Hali 72, December 1993 / January 1994, p.69.  

Provenance:
Property from the George Farrow Collection

Note:
A very similar panel is in the L. A. Mayer Memorial Museum, Jerusalem  (T 432) published in Rachel Hasson, 'A Tall Tale', Hali 69, June/July 1993, pp.96-7). It was described at some length, the iconography identified as coming from the Persian writer Al-Qazwini’s ‘Aja’ib al’Makhluqat wa Ghara ‘ib al-Mawjudat (Wonders of Creation), and catalogued as Safavid. Its appearance drew out two further examples, the present panel, and a fragment with the dealer Erol Kazanci in Istanbul. Rachel Hasson, when she published the George Farrow example in a subsequent Hali article, identified it as a Royal commission, being the most complex example of the three, and containing one extra row of figures ('A Tale of Three Velvets', Hali 72, December 1993 / January 1994, p.69). 

There are a number of related velvets which are generally dated to the later Safavid period, each of which has rows of figures, usually arranged in symmetrical groups. Two are in the Keir Collection (Friedrich Spuhler, Islamic Carpets and Textiles in the Keir Collection, London, 1978, nos.112 and 114. A velvet that at one stage was in the Kelekian collection provides an earlier version of the design (Arthur Upham Pope, A Survey of Persian Art, Oxford, 1938, pl.1038a). Scattered with staggered figures and trees, including a kneeling piper, it shows how the present very formalised design had its roots in a different earlier aesthetic.