Violet Partridge Qum

100% silk pile, hand-knotted in Qum, with silk fringe at both ends. Silk is strong in tension but delicate in every other respect — it abrades, it marks with water, and it loses lustre permanently if treated like wool.

This is a picture rug and is best treated as one. The partridges' barred feathers, beaks and eyes are drawn with only a few knots each, so any wear on the panel would blur them quickly. The turquoise sky is the colour most sensitive to light, and the ivory botehs in the corners will show a mark before the violet ground does. On a wall, away from a window, it will keep its detail for a very long time.

The birds in the panel are partridges — you can tell them by the black and white bars along their flanks and their red beaks and legs. In Persian poetry the partridge is one of the classic images of grace: poets from Hafez onward praise a beloved who walks like a partridge, with the bird's light, strutting step standing for elegance itself. That is why partridges turn up so often in Persian painting and in pictorial silks like this one, usually shown as they are here, in a small group on rocks near water. Look at how the weaver has staged them. One bird stands high on the upper rock, the other two are lower down at the pool's edge, and one of those has bent its head to drink, so the three read as a little scene with a moment in it rather than a row of specimens. Around the panel, the carpet returns to pure ornament — ivory lotus petals, corner botehs, finials — framing the picture the way a gilded mount frames a miniature.