richard tomlinson

Hi all

OK, so Turkotek is probably not the place to be asking about anything Tibetan but ..... here goes;







Here’s a strange looking Tibetan seating mat that I thought was worth a second look. The dyes are all natural and the green in the centre looks quite old. All wool construction. I would date this piece to no later than 1900, possibly a couple of decades earlier.

I am particularly drawn to the unusual iconography of the central ‘sphere’. It seems quite archaic to me.

I was wondering if anyone would like to comment. Has anyone seen other pieces with which to compare this/these design/s?

Cheers
Richard Tomlinson

Marvin Amstey

As a small collector of Tibetan rugs, I'll take a stab at dissecting your sitting mat. The main border, inner pearl border and corner fret work are all standard Chinese design elements. The central figure to me is a flayed animal, a not uncommon design element in Tibetan pieces. The small white designs - above and below the center - are frog's feet, also a common Chinese design element. It is the "flayed animal" design element along with the colors that lead me to agree with your age guess. I especially like the abrashed blue.

Richard Larkin

Hi Marvin, Lloyd, et al,

This is slightly off topic (Tibetan), but within the scope of Chinese elements, and I thought I would correct a comment I made in Francesca's mini salon about Chinese rugs and dyes. I posted some images of a mat employing the tiger pelt design, including a detail shot (below) of a border I said had been clipped to create the effect of a swastika design.



In fact, the design created by the clipping is the Greek key design, also featured on Lloyd's Tibetan piece. Upon close examination, it appears that the technique employed was to clip the pile that would ordinarily be the contrasting color (e. g., white on Lloyd's) lower than the principal color. This seems different from the later practice on Chinese rugs to clip around the edges of design elements to create an embossed look. I wonder whether anyone has noted such practice on any other rugs, Chinese, Tibetan, or otherwise. It is devilishly subtle, and requires squinting into certain light at just the right angle to discern. Perhaps it was more obvious when the piece was new.

Rich Larkin

Marvin Amstey

Richard,
I showed an image in the past of my pillar carpet. A wide upper border (tone-on-tone yellows) - not found elsewhere on the rug has had the design enhanced with clipping. This pillar rug is considered by most experts who have seen it to be circa 1800. The very upper border has the corrosive brown that Michael Francis has talked about. So, yes, clipping to make a design was done a long time ago. Unfortunately, my photo of the carpet is does not resolve that detail.

richard tomlinson

Hi Marvin

We agree on the border, fret work, frog feet, age, and abrash.... but ... a flayed animal? I’m not sure i would agree there.

I have been looking around on the Internet and through my database of images and I think the central motif is clearly a floral design, most likely a lotus or peony. The elements to the left and right of this flower intrigue me. Initially I thought they were stylized bats, which are found on Chinese and Tibetan rugs. Generally though, later pieces exhibit these bats (or butterflies?) with a fair amount of detail. Here are a couple of examples. The second rug has been labelled ‘Gansu’.





Tom Cole, in his article ‘Tibetan Rugs - A Tribal Tradition’ (Originally published Hali 49) shows the following magnificent rug, which he dates to possibly the 17C.



Now I may be drawing a long bow here (a very very long one) but if you look at the central medallion, the design is quite similar to the design above and beneath the floral centre of my rug (curling parts). Also below, a similarly designed medallion from another very old Tibetan rug. I have not found any other rugs which have a similar design. That said, my knowledge is fairly limited I this area.





Looking too at the border of the Cole rug, there could (a very remote possibility I should add) be a distant connection in design to what I thought were bats (side elements of the sphere in my rug)



That said, these elements (both side and upper and lower) are perhaps meandering vines, branches or leaves as seen in many Tibetan pieces.






I would tend to favour a lotus design with meandering vines and leaves to explain the design.

I wonder what others think?

Regards
Richard Tomlinson

richard tomlinson

Hi Rich L

I have 4 Tibetan rugs and I cannot detect any clipping, though generally dark blue dyed wool always seems to stand slightly higher than other colours.

I do remember reading in Denwood's book that this was a common practice among Tibetan rug makers. The pile is carefully clipped after the rug has been completed to create this embossed look.

You distinguish this practice from the Chinese practice of cutting around designs. Do you mean the practice is different because it is applied to borders as opposed to design elements?

Regards
Richard T

Marvin Amstey

Hello Richard,
I like the first blue piece with the bats; its sitting on my dining room table. Somehow I don't recall you visiting and taking pictures
That blue piece is a fragment of an old Tibetan piece - probably 19th c. The blue is wonderfully abrashed. The green is as good as it gets in these rugs.
I still believe the central design in your rug is a flayed animal.
So here we are discussing iconography - ala Jim Allen - which will get us no further along in reaching a conclusion except for interesting conversation, best held with a cold one in hand under a shade tree on a bright summer afternoon.

Richard Tomlinson

Hi Marvin

Perhaps the fact that it is cold and miserable in Perth right now is the reason I am discussing iconography :-)

So - you are the 'mystery' buyer that snaps up these pieces huh? Did you also buy the purple and white geometric piece from ZZ? I negotiated for hours in vain, then retired, and awoke to find it sold.

I recall you combined the verb 'dissect' and adjective 'flayed' in your original post. Perhaps you have some subconscious desire to be a surgeon or butcher?

Anyway, I still cannot see why a weaver would place a flower in the middle of some spatchcocked creature. Perhaps J.Allen might have some ideas on this...

Best
Richard

Steve Price

Hi Richard

There's nothing subconscious about Marvin's desire to be a surgeon. He's an obstetrician/gynecologist, a surgical specialty.

I'm glad to see that I'm not the only participant who knows about spatchcocking. Spatchcocked chicken on the grill (that's a barbie, Richard) is one of my favorites.

Steve Price

Marvin Amstey

Try the spatchcocked bird - chicken, turkey, or duck - in a smoker!

Steve Price

Hi Marvin

When I said the grill, I meant the charcoal smoker. Great invention that I learned about from you, one snowy day in Rochester about 7 years ago.

Steve Price

Jeff Sun

I would also second the idea that the motif is a lotus/peony. Perhaps with some vines which are not as well suited to the space as the weaver might have thought.

Peter van Rooyen

Hi
I reckon true spatchcock (in Oz) is a wee chicken stuffed with prawns, as it cannot be a true barbie without prawns!!
Anyway to the matter at hand, I had a look at the following rug which had a ?bird, bat, angelic being within a vine motif surrounding a central ???? motif








Perhaps a wee bit of a stretch of the imagination or more primitive or what was I smoking. Note the 'Swastikas' around the central motif. Does this give one a clue to the origin of the rug?

Kind regards

Peter van Rooyen

Steve Price

Hi Peter

Spatchcocking a bird is cutting it alongside the spinal column from neck to tail, then opening it up like a butterfly. The prawns sound great, but there's no longer a closed cavity to stuff. No reason why they couldn't be skewered and cooked alongside it, though.

Regards

Steve Price

Peter van Rooyen

Hi Steve

I know we live in different hemispheres, barbecue different things on a device of different names, but also appear to call small chickens different names too.
I include the following:

"Contrary to popular belief the word spatchcock is not a sex act outlawed in Ireland, but a verb meaning to prepare a chicken or other fowl for grilling or roasting by removing the backbone and flattening the bird. Butterflying the bird in this way allows for even, fast cooking. A few days ago I bought four poussin, which is the French term for very small young chickens less than a month old. After spatchcocking, the birds cooked in under 40 minutes from start to finish and they were delicious!

While doing a little on-line research for this post, I realized that spatchcock is not only a verb, but can also be a noun. Spatchcock also (archiacally) refers to the same birds I’d bought for spatchcocking! Apparently it’s an older term still used (by some) in England and Australia for a young chicken under six weeks old, very similar in size to poussin. Seemingly over the years the name for the chicken turned into a verb describing it’s common preparation. But the verb usage became much more commonly used and the noun has (almost) faded to obscurity. Partly I think the reason for this is that few people cook these little chickens anymore; in fact, they’re only available in specialty markets or by special order. Cornish game hens (larger, slightly different crossbreed of poultry) are far more common and a decent substitute, although you’ll want to allow for another 10-15 minutes cooking time."
see http://spencerhgray.wordpress.com/2011/10/10/spatchcocked-spatchcock/

You mob over there fortunately got rid of the 'Poms' before all their bad habits like spelling infiltrated your society too deeply. Unfortunately all the riff-raff were sent over here in prison ships. Bugger!
Anyway yes you can spatchcock a spatchcock.
Have a good one
Peter

Jeff Sun

Peter, without knowing further I would say your rug is either from Inner Mongolia (Baotao, etc) or from Beijjing. My bet is on Beijing. It's possibly from Shaanxi province. If you flip it over and see red wefts...say every 10th weft is red....than it is likely a Shaanxi rug.

As to the "Being in the vine", I'd say it is possibly a Fu (Bat) but probably nothing.

The swastika is a very common motif throughout buddhist countries...including China.

Rich Larkin

Hi Jeff,

This is a shameless violation of the TurkoTek code, not to mention a pathetic hijacking of Richard's thread. However, I wonder whether you would consider taking a look at the tiger stripe mat I posted in frame #6 of the "wool corrosion" thread under Francesca's salon on dyes in Chinese rugs. I've noted with admiration your knowledgeable grasp of the rug situation in China and vicinity, and I'd value your opinion. Any comments are welcome, but I wonder about the following points:

• Have you seen the corrosive stone green color of the tiger stripes elsewhere?

• Do you have an opinion about where it was woven?

• What do you make of the single line of pile in black in the middle image? It appears once, symmetrically, on each side of the rug. It is black, not deep blue, and appears only in those two places. There is no corrosion in it. As well as I can tell, it looks original.

• Have you seen the clipping technique of the pale yellow border, by which a Greek key design was created by clipping the demarking line lower than the adjoining pile?

I appreciate any comments you might make. Incidentally, the colors are not quite as strong as the first image would suggest. That picture was produced by photographers for an exhibition some years ago. The detail pictures are closer to the true look of it.

Apologies to Richard Tomlinson.

Rich Larkin

Jeff Sun

Rich-

I'll help if I can, but I am not too much of a "Dye Guy" and I am sure Francesca and Pierre are better versed.

Nonetheless, I do have books, and I am prone to wild speculation...so here goes.

1. The blue green color: My guess is that it is some mixture of indigo. To quote Hallvard Kuloy from Tibetan Rugs pg 43
(a) Indigo can produce a very dark blue green color.

He also states on the same page:
GREY
(a) Natural wool

So maybe indigo dyed grey wool seems to fit the bill.

Keep in mind that Tibetan rugs and "Chinese" rugs are not really the same and the dyers in Ningxia may have had other stuffs at hand...but indigo seems fairly universal among dyers.

2. The black stripes-I don't think there is anything symbolic here. I think perhaps they are a small repair with available materials, or perhaps the weaver ran out of the appropriate color at a crucial time and used a close substitute which didn't age the same.

3. Carving of the Greek Key-Sure. Why not? As far as I know nobody had ever attached an age to the origin of this practice. Keep in mind that other methods exist to enhance a pattern without cutting.

4. Origin: Probably Ningxia, or Inner Mongolia. The style of weaving is pretty much the same. My guess is that it was made for the Tibetan market or at a minimum for the ecclesiastic market, who seemed to have a virtual lock on Tiger Stripe anything.

if it were from Tibet you would know immediately by examining the knots not the back.


An abbreviated version of this is posted in the dye discussion.

Rich Larkin

Hi Jeff,

Thanks for your comments. My curiosity about the stone green color is centered on the facts that it is quite corrosive, and that I've not seen the color in another rug of any origin. I considered the possibility that it had been clipped low, but I don't think that happened.

Rich Larkin

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Rich and Jeff,
For a pale almond green shade I could suggest potentially "corrosive" and credible dyeing recipes:

Dyeing with a natural yellow like Reseda luteola or Delphinium zalil on a copper mordanted wool.

A rather high concentration of the mordant can indeed impair the stability of wool.

Best regards
Pierre

Marvin Amstey

Another characteristic corrosive green - not the shade in the rug under discussion - is found in antique Fereghan rugs and is often used to identify those rugs.

Richard Larkin

Hi all,

I was thinking the stone green shade Marvin refers to, associated with old Fereghan rugs, is the same one Pierre described in the preceding post. On second thought, I don't recall what the old books say about the recipe (I don't have access to mine at the moment), particularly whether a yellow dye plant source figures into it. Of course, for me, Pierre trumps the old books any day, the whole library for that matter. I just don't remember what the traditional wisdom provides for that issue. I think the Fereghan shade is reputed in some of the authors to bear the Persian name, "ab-i-sangar." They all mention the copper involvement as the corrosive factor.

Anyway, the following image of the corner of a khorjin from (in my opinion) the Malayer area illustrates the color Marvin mentioned.




I say Malayer because it is a bridge area between the Hamadan weaving district and the Sultanabad district (where the Fereghans were reputedly woven). Through the years, I've seen a number of single-wefted rugs with the pale green corrosive dye. They frequently featured the elaborated "S" border partially visible in the image. This particular khorjin is single-wefted. (Fereghans are not typically thought to be so.) The green in my image is only slightly corroded relative to other colors in the piece. However, there happens to be a slightly different shade of pale green used in the piece (lower half, as though the weaver ran out of that yarn and went to a different skein) that is more obviously corroded, but I didn't have an image of that section handy.

That's too much blah blah to underscore the ilustration of the copper-mordanted green, prone to corrosion. In the meantime, I wonder, Pierre, whether you suppose the gray/green in my Chinese tiger-striped mat involved a copper mordant. How about a yellow plant dye (say, one of the two apparently used in my tiger mat) on ordinary indigo-dyed wool, with a copper mordant somewhere in the equation? As a side inquiry, do you have an opinion whether the green shade associated with copper-mordanted dyes has any direct connection to the greenish shade of verdigris, which I understand to be the product of acetic acid on copper?

I've shown an image of the corroded tiger stripes here for convenience.




Jeff,

It's interesting to learn that the many tiger patterned pieces made in China may have been aimed at a Tibetan market. There's no doubt my piece is Chinese. You can see from the image of the back (in the "Wool corrosion" thread in Francesca's salon) that it is a very typical Chinese weave. I'm familiar with the Tibetan weave, which this doesn't have. Forgive me if you have explained the point in the past, but is the fascination with tigers among the Tibetans a religious thing?


Rich Larkin

Pierre Galafassi

Hi Rich and Jeff,

As far as I know, the real chemical cause of wool degradation («corrosion») in presence of mordants like iron-, copper-, or tin salts has not been sufficiently analysed.
Not even the most frequent case, the corrosion of iron / tannin black- and brown-shades, has yet received a convincing explanation.
A fortiori, we ignore the reasons of the potential negative effects of tin (for brighter reds, with cochineal and/or madder ) or copper (for pale almond greens, with various natural yellows).
It appears that wool degradation is not a fatality though. A perfect rinsing of a tin-mordanted red or of a copper-mordanted green seems (in my limited experience) sufficient for avoiding "corrosion" problems. And the concentration of the mordant plays a role too, a fact which the seventeenth- and eighteenth century dyers knew very well, as shown by their recipes for iron / tannin black shades. Very small concentrations of copper in an alum/copper mix of mordants can even improve the lightfastness of the dyeing with some natural yellows.

I do not know whether copper-based pale greens were indeed used by weavers of oriental carpets, nor where or when that may have happened. However, given the ubiquity in central Asia of copper- and tinned copper vessels (and the easy oxidation of both metals), it would seem quite unlikely that the dyers would not have discovered by accident the possibilities of new shades created by these mordants.

True Rich, many copper salts are blue or green (copper acetate, sulfate and carbonate for example) but this fact is unrelated to the shade of the various metal complexes formed between the copper atom and the various natural yellow dyes in mordant dyeing.
Besides, most such mordant dyeing operations involving copper and a yellow natural dye actually yield a brown or a greenish-brown. A pale green shade is rather the exception.

Not only copper but also iron allows to achieve various pale greens with natural yellows. It all depends on the relative concentrations of the various mordants (Alum, copper, iron).


Two examples, among many possible:
A. Wool pre-mordanted with alum and little copper, with Reseda luteola
B. Wool pre-mordanted with alum and little iron, with Matricaria chamomila



best regards
Pierre

Richard Larkin

Thanks Pierre,

Very interesting. So, we cannot be sure at the moment that the pale green of the Fereghans (a true fact for sure, in and of itself) was achieved through the use of copper, though the books say so. Such it is with most rug-related lore. No doubt, lab analysis of the dyed wool would disclose such facts, and no doubt, the work has been done somewhare sometime on the Fereghan green.

Rich Larkin

Joel Greifinger

Hi Pierre,

So, might we extrapolate that in traditions where wool degradation (i.e. corrosion) is the norm in black/dark brown shades in pieces 'of a certain age', that the dyers/weavers either understood that their iron mordant concentration was apt to produce corrosion (with its 'textured' effect) or were so new to the whole procedure to not yet have learned this? I won't even mention by name the particular groups I have in mind. Don't let me put you on the spot...

Since Rich has already apologized for hijacking the thread...

Joel Greifinger

Jeff Sun

1. Regarding Copper as a mordant.

Kuloy (Pg 41, Tibetan Rugs) sites the following mordants in Tibet:

"Zinc Sulphate, Tiktsa, described as a strong white powered, Chang, a widely used barley beet was also used with indigo. Copper Sulphate and alumaceous earth was also used with the fruit of the arura..."

Again, Tibet is not Ningxia or Mongolia, but given the extensive trade an pilgrim traffic between them, there is a good chance the ingredients were (are) similar.

2.Why the Tibetans like Tiger (and Leopard) skins? Short story: It's a symbol of power and only the rich, noble or ecclesiastical elite have (had) them. Of course, tigers are not native to tibet, so often the next best thing was substituted to convey the auspicious nature of the beasts: A tiger skin rug. Some of these feature such realistic renderings of a Tiger's stripes, that the weaver must surely have been staring at an actual pelt.

3. Other symbols: Lotus get's used OFTEN with a capital O in Tibet. Om Mani Pad Me Hum, the formulaic prayer said by all Tibetan buddhists literally translates as "Praise to The Jewel in The Lotus". Of course the actual meaning goes beyond the literal translation, but you can see how the lotus figures prominently.