Today’s budding oriental rug collector has a difficult task. Faced with a dwindling supply of top examples and rising prices, the new collector’s need for good education and guidance is greater than ever. Luckily, with the many scholarly books written in the last thirty years, an excellent bi-monthly publication from London (Hali magazine,

which contains top-notch articles and illustrations pertaining to the scholarship of rugs and textiles, as well as good reporting on current events in the rug world), and a group of well-educated dealers and established collectors who are more than willing to share their knowledge, there is hope for the new buyer. What once had been a field cloaked in mystery and intentional withholding of knowledge by some, is now much less intimidating.

Generally, the most beautiful rugs will have a certain generosity of spacing in the design, whereas in later examples, the drawing of the rug may be crowded and the motifs may become more and more derivative. As an example, a very popular type of rug today is the Serapi, woven in the Heriz district of Northwest Persia.

The production of these rugs started in the mid-nineteenth century, and these early rugs were woven with wide borders and large-scale stylized floral and geometric motifs throughout the rug

As these rugs gained in popularity toward the end of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth century, production increased, which led to the need for shortcuts in their making.

You might not think that packing more design into a rug and reducing the scale of the design would represent a shortcut, but it takes much more talent to execute a simple design with beautiful restrained balance and color sense than it does to fill the field and make the motifs smaller and tighter

A practice which has unfortunately tempted many rug dealers today, particularly those who deal in large decorative carpets that need to be harmonious with the soft and neutral-colored fabrics that are popular for some of today’s interior decoration, is the practice of chemically stripping rugs to make their colors appear quieter and more neutral.

Because pale rugs are bringing very strong prices and have been in much demand, some dealers have chosen to bleach strong colored rugs to make them lighater, and in this stripping process, the wool has been compromised and will never regain its natural luster and resilience