Cream Cupbearer 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 faces are the least forgiving thing a rug can carry. The eyes, lips and hands here are drawn with only a few knots each, and any wear would change the expression long before it showed elsewhere. The cream background is also pale enough to show a mark. On a wall, away from direct light, it will stay exactly as it is.

The cupbearer — sāqi in Persian — is one of the central figures of Persian lyric poetry. In the verses of Hafez and the quatrains attributed to Khayyam, the one who pours the wine stands for pleasure, companionship and the passing moment, and painters have returned to the scene for centuries: a figure raising a flask, a cup held out to receive it, flowers all around. This rug follows that tradition closely, and the weaver built the whole picture around one detail. Find the stream of wine. It leaves the spout of the raised flask as a thin red line and falls straight down, between the two faces, into the cup. Everything else in the picture curves — hair, robes, branches, water — so that one straight vertical line is what the eye settles on, and it joins the two figures at the exact point where the scene happens.