# The Emperor's Carpet > Unidentified Safavid court carpet workshop - Second half of the 16th century (Metropolitan Museum dating: 1550-1599) > Canonical HTML: https://iconotheca.com/artworks/safavid-court-carpet-workshop/emperors-carpet-met/ > Published by Servola Systems GmbH. Last verified: 2026-09-25 ## Tombstone - **Artist:** Unidentified Safavid court carpet workshop - **Date:** Second half of the 16th century (Metropolitan Museum dating: 1550-1599) - **Medium:** Silk (warp and weft), wool (pile); asymmetrically knotted pile - **Dimensions:** 759.5 x 339.1 cm (299 x 133 1/2 in); approx. 65.3 kg (144 lbs, as measured on a 10-inch storage tube) - **Object type:** Textile - **Period:** Safavid Iran, second half of the sixteenth century - **Current location:** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York - **Attribution:** disputed ## Summary A silk-and-wool Safavid court carpet of the second half of the sixteenth century, nearly 7.6 meters long, its red field carrying a dense lattice of vines, palmettes and confronted animals in combat within a wide blue-green border inscribed with the verse of the twelfth-century poet Zahir al-Din Faryabi. It takes its name, and shares it, with a near-identical twin in Vienna: both carpets are traditionally, though not documentedly, said to have passed from Czar Peter the Great of Russia to the Habsburg emperor Leopold I after 1698 and to have furnished a Habsburg summer residence.What is solidly documented begins later: the 1925 sale of this carpet by a Vienna museum to the London dealers Cardinal and Harford after the Habsburg monarchy's fall, its public sale at Christie's on 5 July 1928, its purchase soon after for the Chicago collector Edith Rockefeller McCormick by the dealer-scholar Arthur Upham Pope, and its exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and the Art Institute of Chicago, both in 1931. Pope, who had sold the carpet to McCormick, organized the exhibition that showed it and then published admiringly on its design, sold it again after her 1932 death, this time to the Metropolitan Museum, which acquired it with the Rogers Fund in 1943.Where it was actually woven remains an open scholarly question: the Museum's own catalogue commits only to Iran, while the literature has placed the carpet and its Vienna twin variously at Tabriz, Kashan and Herat. The carpet arrived at the Museum in fragile condition and was shown publicly only twice in some sixty years before a three-year conservation project, begun in 2006, removed roughly seven hundred old patches and made it safe for the regular display it now receives in the Museum's Iranian galleries. ## Provenance Every link carries a grade. `documented` means a cited source supports it, `disputed` means the identification is argued but not established, `unknown` means we have no owner for that span and have not bridged it. - **c. 1550-1600** Safavid court workshop (city unresolved: Tabriz, Kashan and Herat all proposed) `[documented]` (origin) Woven in Safavid Iran in the second half of the sixteenth century, per the Metropolitan Museum's own dating. The weaving city, patron and original setting are not documented in the sources consulted; see open_questions. - **undated** Habsburg imperial collection, Vienna `[disputed]` (tradition of gift and acquisition) This carpet and its twin are traditionally said to have entered Habsburg hands as a diplomatic gift passed from Czar Peter the Great of Russia to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I after 1698, and to have furnished a Habsburg summer residence. The Metropolitan Museum's own published material states this in hedged language ('said to have'). No primary Russian or Habsburg court document confirming the 1698 transfer was located in the sources consulted; the carpets' presence in the Habsburg imperial collection by some point before the twentieth century is better supported than the specific gift story. - **1918-1921-1925** Austrian state museum custody, Vienna (successor to the Habsburg imperial collection) `[documented]` (nationalization) With the fall of the Habsburg monarchy at the end of 1918, the former imperial collections, including this pair of carpets, passed into Austrian state museum custody in Vienna. - **1925-1928** Cardinal and Harford, London (dealers) `[documented]` (sale) In 1925, to raise funds, the Viennese museum sold this carpet (retaining its twin, which remains in Vienna) to the London dealers Cardinal and Harford. - **1928** Sold at auction; passed to Arthur Upham Pope, acting for Edith Rockefeller McCormick `[documented]` (auction and purchase) Consigned by Cardinal and Harford and sold at Christie, Manson and Woods, London, 5 July 1928, lot 146. The carpet passed by or shortly after that sale to the American collector Edith Rockefeller McCormick of Chicago, acquired for her by the dealer and scholar Arthur Upham Pope. The hammer price is not given in the sources consulted. - **1928-1932** Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Chicago `[documented]` (collection) Lent by McCormick to the Royal Academy's International Exhibition of Persian Art, Burlington House, London, January-February 1931, and to the Art Institute of Chicago under the title 'The Emperor's Carpet lent by Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick,' 4 April - 1 November 1931. McCormick died 25 August 1932. - **1932-1943** Unknown (presumably the McCormick estate) `[unknown]` (gap) The carpet's custody in the eleven years between McCormick's death and its sale to the Metropolitan Museum is not documented in the sources consulted. It does not appear to have been included in the general McCormick estate household-contents sales held in Chicago and Lake Forest in January 1934, which were dominated by furniture, books, linens, porcelain and silver rather than major carpets, though this record did not examine those sale catalogues in full. - **1943-present** The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York `[documented]` (acquisition) Sold to the Museum by Arthur Upham Pope and purchased with the Rogers Fund, 1943; accessioned as 43.121.1. One secondary source states the carpet arrived at the Museum in 1941, two years before this accession date; that discrepancy is not resolved in the sources consulted. ## Auction results Hammer and buyer's premium are stated separately. Where a source conflates them this record says so. - **1928-07-05** Christie, Manson and Woods, - Estimate: Not stated in the sources consulted - Hammer: Not stated in the sources consulted - With premium: Not stated in the sources consulted - Sold in London as lot 146, consigned by the dealers Cardinal and Harford, who had held the carpet since its 1925 sale by the Vienna museum. This is the only public auction sale of this carpet located in the sources consulted for this record; it precedes the carpet's documented ownership by Edith Rockefeller McCormick and its eventual 1943 sale to the Metropolitan Museum, which was a private dealer sale by Arthur Upham Pope, not a second auction. ## Open questions - Was this carpet woven at Kashan, Tabriz or Herat? The Metropolitan Museum's own record does not commit to a city, and the scholarly literature is divided. - Is the story that the carpet was a 1698 diplomatic gift from Peter the Great of Russia to the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I a documented transfer or a later tradition? The Museum's own language hedges it as 'said to have' happened. - What was the carpet's custody between Edith Rockefeller McCormick's death in August 1932 and its sale to the Metropolitan Museum in 1943? No source consulted documents those eleven years. - What was the hammer price and who else bid when the carpet was sold at Christie, Manson and Woods, London, on 5 July 1928, lot 146? - Did the carpet arrive at the Metropolitan Museum in 1941, as one secondary source states, or only in 1943, the Museum's own accession year? This record has not resolved the discrepancy. - Was the carpet made for a specific, named Safavid shah, or produced by the court workshop for a wider elite market without a single royal commission? No source consulted names a patron. - Has a technical dye or fiber analysis of this specific carpet been published by the Metropolitan Museum's own conservation department, comparable to studies published for other major Safavid carpets? None was located in the sources consulted. ## Sources - [1] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection object record and open-access API, 'The Emperor's Carpet,' accession 43.121.1, object ID 450509. - [2] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 'The Emperor's Carpet,' Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History, Department of Islamic Art. Direct fetch was blocked by the server (HTTP 429) during research for this record; content was confirmed through indexed search excerpts and a secondary blog reproducing the Museum's own text verbatim. Flagged for direct re-verification. - [3] The Art Institute of Chicago, exhibition record, 'The Emperor's Carpet lent by Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick,' exhibition 5521, 4 April - 1 November 1931, confirmed via the Art Institute of Chicago's own open API (api.artic.edu). - [4] Sotheby's, Rugs and Carpets, sale L18873 (2018), lot 62 catalogue note, provenance and bibliography for the original 'Emperor' carpet pair cited as comparanda for a later reproduction. - [5] Caroline Mawer, 'The Emperor of Persian Carpets,' blog post, 14 November 2014. An independent researcher's blog, not a museum or scholarly publication; flagged for replacement with a scholarly or museum-archival source where one can be located. - [6] Encyclopaedia Iranica, 'CARPETS ix. Safavid Period.' Direct fetch was blocked by the server (HTTP 403) during research for this record; content was confirmed through indexed search excerpts. Flagged for direct re-verification. - [7] The Quilt Show, 'Conserving the Emperor's Carpet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,' blog newsletter, summarizing a Metropolitan Museum video on the carpet's 2006-2009 conservation project. - [8] Royal Academy of Arts, exhibition catalogue record, '1931 - International Exhibition of Persian Art,' Burlington House, London. - [9] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, press release, 'Metropolitan Museum to Open Renovated Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia' (2011). - [10] The Metropolitan Museum of Art, collection object record and open-access API, 'Vase Carpet,' accession 43.121.2, object ID 450510. --- Images on this record are public domain or CC0 and are hosted by us. No image on this site is generated or simulated. If you quote this record, quote the provenance grades with it.