Aug 01 2008
Why Buy an Antique Carpet?
We are currently in the midst of a major revival of traditional, hand-made rug weaving virtually throughout the rug-producing regions of the world. This movement began several decades ago in Turkey, initially at the instigation of European rug aficionados like Rainer Boehmer. Known by the acronym DOBAG, or Project DOBAG, the goal was not only to reproduce more authentically the range of designs current in Turkish weaving up through the nineteenth century, but to do so in handspun, vegetable-dyed wool. While it took a few years for weavers to recover the knack of using handspun fibers and combining the varying shades of color inherent to vegetable dyes, the results were impressive and they began to sweep the new rug market. Soon weavers were producing vegetable-dyed, handspun copies or close adaptations of various nineteenth century rugs types in Afghanistan, India, China, and Iran. By the late nineteen nineties, such production had become standard, largely supplanting the less authentic design trends and synthetic dyes that had come to dominate oriental rug weaving throughout the twentieth century. Consequently, it now seems to many potential rug buyers that they no longer need to go to the expense of buying an antique rug. Nowadays it is possible to acquire new rugs with the same sort of color, design, wool quality, and technical standards of the ones produced a hundred years ago or earlier in perfect condition for a fraction of the price. But is this really the case? Are new rugs of this sort really the equivalent of the ones they are copying or recreating? Continue Reading »
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