Black Musician 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 portrait and should be treated as one. The musician's face, hands and the strings of the lute are drawn with only a few knots each, and wear on a floor would blur them quickly. The near-black field shows every speck of lint and pale thread, and red silk against black is the combination most at risk if the rug ever gets wet. On a wall, away from direct light, it will stay as it is.

Look at the roses before the portrait. They are not the stylised palmettes and rosettes of a classical Persian field: they are open, many-petalled garden roses, drawn almost botanically, with buds and serrated leaves. Persian weavers call this style gol farang — the 'foreign flower' — because it came into Persian design from European textiles and wallpapers in the nineteenth century, and it is usually set, as here, on a very dark ground so the reds glow. The portrait inside belongs to a different tradition, the Persian album painting of a musician with her instrument and an open book of poems, music and poetry side by side. The weaver has combined the two and then let them overlap: follow the edge of the gold frame at its lower left and you will find the musician's robe crossing it, spilling into the rose field, as if she were leaning out of the picture.