DESIGN FILE

FEATURE

122 I HALI 144

Left: ‘Ziegler’ carpet, 21st century. 3.30 x 4.22m (10'10" x 13'10"). Courtesy Renaissance Carpet and Tapestries. New York. Below left: Watercolour cartoon on paper

company even accepted designs from Western retailers; secondly, it maintained its own dyeing facility in Sultanabad, providing weavers with ready-dyed yarn, thereby controlling the quality of the dyes and colouration. It seems that the company was innovative, too, in producing small sample rugs (vagireh)as models from which their weavers could work. The company produced rugs in Sultanabad for around fifty years from the mid-1880s to 1934, and we know that at the turn of the century, they had about 2,500 looms in over a hundred villages around Sultanabad. During their half century of production, Ziegler & Co. must have woven and exported thousands of rugs to both Europe and America. By all accounts, the business was very successful. In Britain and America, where machineloomed Wilton and Brussels carpets had been popular since about 1850, the new production of good, inexpensive Persian rugs coming from Ziegler & Co. and others helped to change popular styles of interior design. When we turn our attention from Ziegler & Co. to the rugs it actually produced, the record is sketchier. Much of the available information is attributable to Annette Ittig, who in her HALI article reported on archival material written by the first manager of Ziegler’s agency in Sultanabad. In particular, she wrote about a collect

ion of Ziegler cartoons – point papers or drawings from which rugs were woven. Thirteen photographs of the Ziegler cartoons appear in colour, although some are of border details and others are details of field designs which may be part of the same drawing. However Ittig cautions us that, “Today, the term ‘Ziegler’ is used in the trade as a label of quality to describe a manufacture. However, as such rugs bear neither company logos nor inscriptions linking them to Ziegler’s production, and as similar ‘made-for-export’ pieces were woven for other firms both in Sultanabad and elsewhere, differentiating between them has been problematic.” Elsewhere in the article she tells us that Ziegler’s rugs and other Western-designed carpets were copied by Persian and even by Turkish manufacturers! Finally, she adds that, “At the present time it is not known if or how the various lines produced for Zieglers differed structurally from the qualities woven for their competition.” Clearly, Ittig believed that the cartoons reproduced in the article would help, and it does seem as if a collection of genuine Ziegler designs would give us the clues we need to pin down which carpets were made by the firm. The cartoons were drawn on graph paper and coloured in gouache and watercolour – with a magnifying glass one can count around a hundred knots per square inch (approximately 1,500 per square decimetre). Some of the designs are extraordinary, others nothing special. Interesting as these cartoons are, they do not seem to help us to identify Zieglers with any certainty, with one possible exception: a medallion and corner cartoon seems identical in design (though not in colour) to a rug illustrated on the same page. However, even that seems problematical as the rug is said to be made of silk. The literature has not revealed any other references to Ziegler silk carpets. Though Ittig is quite clear about the difficulty of identifying these carpets, her article is illustrated with photographs of rugs that are captioned as Ziegler carpets but she does not explain how she knows they were made by Ph. Ziegler & Company. When I began research for this article, I assumed that I was finally going to