ZIEGLER CARPETS OLD AND NEW

DESIGN FILE

The Elusive ‘Zieglers’

Founded at the height of the 19th century ‘Persian Revival’, Ziegler & Co. in Sultanabad was the first Western firm to co-ordinate the production and export of Persian carpets for Western markets. Today the terms ‘Ziegler’ and ‘Mahal’ are used as a catch-all for many desirable furnishing carpets from Iran and beyond. Here the Bay Area dealer and writer Emmett Eilandtries to understand what a ‘Ziegler’ carpet is and asks whether the ubiquity of the label has rendered it meaningless?

There exists a cabal of antique rug dealers, new rug dealers, collectors, rug producers, rug writers and editors who cheerfully promote the notion that they can spot a Ziegler’ carpet a mile off. The truth is, however, that we would not know an antique Ziegler carpet if we tripped over it. When I began to research these carpets, I thought I knew all about them: Zieglers are great-looking old ‘Mahals’ woven for the Ziegler Company that sell for $60-90,000 and more at auction. And, of course, Zieglers are also the brand new rugs that use the designs of old Ziegler carpets. I was wrong. The truth is that no one is sure which of the old Sultanabad (Arak) area carpets were woven by the Ziegler Company. And consequently no one can say about a new carpet, “This is a rendering of an antique Ziegler.” What sells at at auction for such high prices are carpets that someone thinks, or at least hopes, were produced by or for the Manchesterbased firm of Ph. Ziegler & Company in the late 19th century. Some of them are of course real Zieglers, but we just do not know which ones. We do however know quite a lot about the company, largely through the account in The Persian Carpet by A. Cecil Edwards (London 1953), who worked in the oriental carpet export business from about 1900 until 1947, spending a lot of time in the Iranian rug markets, and was present during most of the Ziegler years. He tells us that for 160 years, between 1722 (when the Afghans invaded the Persian Empire) and 1880, there was scarcely any carpet industry in Iran at all: of course rugs were woven there, but before 1880 rug-making was what he calls “a small but useful handicraft…an insignificant village industry.” He writes that the majority of rugs exported to the West before about 1880 were old pieces that had originally been woven for the Persian domestic market. By the 1880s the supply of old rugs in Iran had been depleted and exports had dwindled. For the first time therefore, according to Edwards, the merchants of Tabriz decided to produce new carpets expressly for export to the West. As early as 1875 they had established an office in Sultanabad, a small town in western Iran with a rug weaving tradition. A few years later, Ziegler & Co. joined them in commissioning the weaving of rugs there for export to London and New York. Ziegler was thus present at the very birth of the modern carpet industry in Iran, and was to become important in shaping what rugs would be woven in Sultanabad for the next fifty years. The company distinguished itself from other producers in Sultanabad in several ways: first, by designing many of its own rugs with European taste in mind. According to Annette Ittig (‘Ziegler’s Carpet Cartoons’, HALI 80,1995, pp.82-87), the

Ziegler carpet, west Persia, ca. 1880. 3.90 x 5.02m (12'9" x 16' 6"). From the collection of Sigmund Freud. Courtesy Christie’s London

HALI 144 I 121