Sultanabad carpets are appreciated for the grand, monumental scale of their design and for the ornamental detail of the floral motifs or palmettes, which all derive from classical Persian prototypes. The scale and detail of this one comes especially close to seventeenth century Kerman carpets. But unlike most Sultanabads, which often display a soft palette geared toward western decorative taste, this example retains the vibrant and varied color range of the classical originals – a brilliant clear red ground set against lovely blues, gold’s, and oranges in the flowers. And like the classical forerunners this carpet frames the field decisively with a dark blue ground border, whose effectiveness is picked up in the field by the sparing use of dark blue in the palmettes. Sultanabads justly stand out within the larger Persian production of the nineteenth century, and among them this example is one of the finest.
