A Garden Woven in Time: The Tree Carpet at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
During our recent journey through the United States, we visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art, whose galleries bring together works from many cultures and periods. For Ararat Rugs, however, the visit carried a particular significance. Among the museum’s historic carpets, we encountered an extraordinary Persian work known simply as the Tree Carpet.
Woven in Iran during the sixteenth or seventeenth century, the carpet belongs to the classical age of Persian weaving. Its maker is unknown, yet its design possesses a remarkably individual character: monumental without heaviness, densely ornamented without losing order, and contemplative despite its immense scale.
Seeing it in person revealed qualities that cannot be fully understood through a photograph—the architectural presence of the cypress trees, the depth of the wine-red field, the shifting blue-greens and the almost restless energy of the border.
This encounter has become the starting point for a new Ararat Rugs project: a contemporary reinterpretation of the Tree Carpet, developed through close study, hand-spun wool, natural dyes and traditional handweaving.
The Museum and Its Carpet Collections
The Philadelphia Museum of Art’s carpet holdings are distinguished not only by their geographical breadth, but also by the histories of the collectors who assembled them. Two groups played a particularly important role: the collection formed by the Reverend Charles F. Williams and Mary Lees Williams, and the collection of Philadelphia collector John D. McIlhenny.
The Williams collection was assembled over approximately three decades, beginning in the late nineteenth century. Charles F. Williams was closely connected to the American carpet industry through the Lees family, while Mary Lees Williams appears to have played a decisive role in the couple’s connoisseurship.
The Joseph Lees Williams Memorial Collection
Museum scholar Charles Grant Ellis later emphasized Mary Lees Williams’ knowledge and discerning eye. Their collection was therefore not merely the achievement of a single celebrated collector, but a shared pursuit shaped to a considerable degree by Mary’s judgment.
After the death of their young son in 1900, the group became known as the Joseph Lees Williams Memorial Collection. Its quality was recognized early: fifteen of the fifty rugs shown in an important 1910 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art came from the Williams collection.
Thirty-nine works later arrived in Philadelphia for the opening exhibition of the museum’s Fairmount building in 1928. Most became the property of the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1955.
The collection includes important Persian, Anatolian, Mamluk, Syrian and Spanish carpets and fragments. Within this varied group, the Tree Carpet occupies an exceptional position.
A Border in Constant Movement
The border has an energy quite different from the stillness of the cypresses. Against a dark blue ground, interlacing yellow, red and light blue bands divide, cross and reform into arabesques, cartouches and palmettes. Its movement is intricate and irregular, creating a lively frame around the more measured garden.
The result is not a literal plan of a Persian garden. It is closer to an imagined, inexhaustible landscape: an ordered wilderness in which the viewer can continue discovering new plants, colors and relationships.
A Monumental Work—and a Surviving Fragment
The Tree Carpet is monumental even in its present form. Yet what survives is only part of the original weaving. The museum records that it was once almost forty feet long, while detailed scholarly examination has shown that sections of the original side borders were reused when the carpet was shortened and closed at its upper end.
Its exact first dimensions cannot now be established with certainty. Historical reconstruction studies have proposed additional rows of trees, but their number and arrangement remain open to interpretation. We are not looking at an untouched composition, but at a masterpiece that has been cut, altered, repaired and preserved through centuries.
Beginning the Ararat Rugs Reinterpretation
Our reinterpretation will begin with the carpet’s essential vocabulary: the rhythm of the cypresses, the layered flowering trees, the deep garden field and the exceptional interlaced border.
These elements will be redrawn and balanced for a newly woven carpet while preserving the sense of abundance and quiet monumentality that distinguishes the historic work.
The final carpet will not be described as a replica or a reconstruction. It will be an Ararat Rugs reinterpretation: a new handwoven work shaped by direct observation, historical research and respect for the original, but given its own material identity and place in the present.
From Museum Study to the Loom
The project will develop through four connected stages:
Historical and Structural Study
Documenting the surviving composition, its repetitions, changes of scale, border construction and evidence of later alteration.
Drawing and Color Interpretation
Rebuilding the design as a complete contemporary weaving plan without presenting speculative additions as historical fact.
Material and Dye Development
Translating the wine reds, indigo blues, blue-greens, yellows, ivories and softened earth colors into hand-spun wool and a natural-dye palette.
Sampling and Weaving
Testing the relationship between knot scale, pile, line and color before beginning the complete carpet.
Natural Color and the Life of the Surface
Madder will provide the foundation for the wine-red field; indigo, used alone and in combination with yellow dyes, will shape the blue and blue-green passages; and plant sources such as reseda, pomegranate and walnut will help establish the yellows and quieter earth tones.
Variations created by hand spinning and dyeing will not be treated as imperfections. They will give the colors depth, movement and life, just as subtle changes of tone animate historic carpets.
One design decision deserves particular attention: whether the later-added birds should remain. Removing them would bring the new composition closer to the carpet’s original botanical conception; retaining them would acknowledge the object’s later history. We will study both possibilities during the drawing stage before deciding how this part of the story should be carried into the new work.
Continuing the Voyage of the Rug
Standing before the Tree Carpet in Philadelphia, we were reminded that a historic carpet is never only a design. It is also a record of materials, labor, movement, damage, repair, collecting and survival. Its missing sections are part of its meaning, just as surely as its cypresses and flowers.
Our purpose is not to make the old carpet appear new again, nor to reproduce its surface mechanically. We want to understand the intelligence behind its composition and allow that intelligence to pass through living hands once more.
From museum study to drawing, from natural dyeing to the loom, this project will follow the path at the heart of Ararat Rugs: carrying the values and knowledge of historic weaving into a new work that belongs to our own time.
We will document the development of the Tree Carpet Reinterpretation through future articles, including the first drawings, color studies, weaving samples and the work of the artisans who will bring the design back to the loom.