Turquoise Angels Qum

100% silk pile, hand-knotted in Qum, with silk fringe at both ends and a small signature cartouche in the guard stripe at one end. 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 and should be treated as one. The turquoise sky is the largest area of colour and the one most sensitive to light, and the faces and hands of the figures are drawn with only a few knots each — wear on a floor would erase them long before it touched the border. Hung away from a window, it will keep its colour and detail for a very long time.

Most rug designs are built to be still: a medallion at the centre, mirrored halves, a border that holds everything in place. This one is built to move. Follow the white cloth with your eye. It enters low on the left, where winged figures push it up from beneath, sweeps across the middle carrying the reclining figure, and rises to the top right, where hands reach down out of the clouds to take its corners. Every figure is placed along that one diagonal, and every arm is either lifting or pulling, so the picture has a direction — upward — that a carpet field almost never has. The turquoise sky helps: it is left mostly empty, apart from a few clouds, so nothing interrupts the lift. The border does the opposite job. Its flowers repeat evenly on all four sides, which is what lets a scene this dynamic sit comfortably on a wall as a finished, framed picture.