19th century Persian Kurdish Bag Face

This 19th century Persian Kurdish bag face has the most wonderful colours: richly saturated tones of red, green and yellow and undyed white mark out the flowers of various shapes on the dark blue field.  The main border on a yellow ground is also decorated with flowers in the deep colours often found in Kurdish weavings.

A number of aspects are unusual about this bag face:

Firstly, the fact that the central field has "spandrels" at one end with a stripe pattern, which is echoed in the remaining three sides bordering the centre. 

Secondly, the format. The pile of the squarish main body of the bag face is continued in a panel with similar colours, but a different, very geometrical pattern of a lattice of stepped diamonds. It would appear that this panel formed the flat bottom of the bag, with the kelim forming the back (a strip of six centimetres of this kelim is still there, visible at the bottom of the image). There is evidence of this bottom panel being taken in to form the folds for the corners. We know from other bags (see, for example, the Bakhtiari khorjin on our website) that piling the bottom of a bag was occasionally done in order to improve durability - after all, these bags were used and had to be functional as well as beautiful.

The quality of the dyes and the wool is superb - this is a real object of beauty and a very good example of tribal art.

Dimensions

Price on application

This object is eligible for a Certificate of BADA Provenance

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