Fragment No. 72

Working with young people is a mainstay of learning and public programming at Leighton House. We immediately saw the arrival of Fragment #72 at the museum as a golden opportunity to give young people a meaningful stake in a unique project. Across a 2-week period, nine young people aged between 16 – 20 years old worked together, responding to Fragment #72 itself and exploring the threads that could connect it to a19^th century artist-studio house and museum in London.

The young people were all on work experience placements at Leighton House and this project undoubtedly supported workplace skills development, from team working and communication through to research skills and creative thinking. However, Fragment #72 was a gateway to so much more – it was the trigger for debate and collaborative co-production, it created a social space for friendship, sharing ideas and experiences and it offered a focus for the young people to become active cultural producers and partners, with responsibilities and heard voices.

This article is an amalgamation of the written and spoken words of the young people themselves, and my own commentary and reflections on the process and outcomes. The experience included presentations by Dr Melanie Gibson, author of The Arab Hall: Frederic Leighton: Traveller and Collector, and Hannah Lund, Curator; self-directed research and observations; informal, self-directed conversations and mentored discussions with the Learning and Public Programme team.

With sincere thanks to our students Aaliyah, Celia, Hannan, James, Matilda, Melina, Mikyle, Molly and Salwa.

Frederic, Lord Leighton (1830-1896) was a Victorian artist with an extensive carpet and textile collection. Much of Leighton’s carpet collection originated from central and western Asia, with his first carpet being bought in 1865. He viewed these carpets as luxurious works of art which he used to build the aesthetic of his home. After Leighton died all of his possessions, including his carpets and textiles, were auctioned off at Christies in 1896. The museum has now spent many years recovering and curating his home, including recreating his love for carpets, matching the original visual and cultural aesthetic. His collection was meticulously chosen for their designs and colours; however, it is unlikely that Leighton truly understood the cultural significance of his carpets related to where and how they were originally made. We think that the CulturalxCollab project embodies similar ideas about cultural origins and appreciating art beyond the aesthetic. With Fragment #72 we wanted to explore what being involved in this project means to us and how the replacement objects within the museum may change their meaning.

Fragment #72 was an entry point to exploring Leighton’s collection of carpets, as well as wider questions around collecting by individuals and institutions, dealer networks and the 19^th century art economy of circulation and dispersal.

Why and how did Leighton collect carpets? On his death in 1896, his extensive collection of art, textiles, ceramics, furniture, even wine was auctioned by Christie, Manson & Woods. The students, guided by Dr Melanie Gibson, took on the role of researchers, re-discovering a collection of nearly 60 carpets, using the catalogue from this sale, along with other evidence such as correspondence with dealers, cheque payments to the emporium Liberty, photographs such as those of the house interiors Leighton commissioned from the firm of Bedford Lemere & Co in 1880 and 1895, loans to an exhibition at the Burlington Fine Arts Club in 1885, contemporary descriptions and anecdotes, and of course Leighton’s own artworks. They discovered that Leighton made three substantial payments to Vincent Robinson (1829-1910) between 1877-1886, a highly respected dealer described as ‘the carpet man’ by William Morris (1834-1896). George Birdwood (1832-1917), associate of the South Kensington Museum, singled out Leighton as a connoisseur of ancient carpets. 

Students were able to some extent to trace the object histories of individual carpets. Leighton’s first carpet was purchased by him in 1865. Although it was woven in present day Pakistan, the artist believed it to have been made in Iran and to have once belonged to Mary Queen of Scots. The carpet can be seen in Leighton’s painting ‘Study at a Reading Desk’, laid out on the floor but it was in fact usually displayed vertically in an ebony frame, in a prime position at the top of the main stairs. This carpet is now in the collection of the Museum of Islamic Art, Doha. 

Another distinctive carpet can be seen in historic photographs folded over a screen in Leighton’s studio, identified as a16^th century hunting carpet, made in Iran and now in the collection of the Asian Art Museum at Harvard. Again, the carpet is characterised by strong, vivid colours, animals and flowers. 

As war loomed across Europe in 1939, museums across the continent began to make plans to ensure the safety of their collections. In Berlin, the Museum of Islamic Art’s Caucasian dragon carpet was sent to the mint for safe keeping. At the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, some portable objects were moved to the basement, while particularly large objects were protected in situ. Other parts of the collection were moved out of the museum altogether, with the V&A securing two locations for the storage of the collection: a London underground station and an Elizabethan country house. Thanks to the V&A’s archives, we are able to learn more about these sites.

The latter was Montacute House in Somerset (southwest England), a late-sixteenth-century house, given to National Trust in 1931. By the end of 1939, the museum’s most important tapestries, carpets, and textiles had been transferred to Montacute. Around 120 carpets were sent, 27 of which were laid out on the floors, with the rest rolled. One such carpet was the sixteenth-century Ardabil Carpet (museum no. 272-1892) from Iran. Dated 1539-40, the carpet is one of a pair woven for the ancestral Safavid shrine of Shaykh Safi al-Din in Ardabil, northwest Iran. It had been acquired by the V&A in 1892 from the Manchester carpet dealer Vincent J. Robinson. The carpet is special thanks to the inscription which dates it and for the density of its knot count, which allows for a remarkable fineness in the design. It is also a very large carpet, measuring over 10 metres in length. Now laid out at the heart of the museum’s Jameel Gallery for the Islamic Middle East, the carpet has a weighty permanence to it, but in 1939 it was rolled up and put into a truck to take it to the safety of the British countryside.

However, even in the relative safety of the Somerset, there was another enemy: the moth. Curators took lengthy precautions to keep the pests at bay. The carpets were rolled in strong paper and sealed with ‘sticky paper’ to stop the moths being able to access the objects. There was further concern that any spray used on the carpets might prove to have harmful effects in the future, but it was a risk worth taking, and the latest research was consulted. Turpentine was favoured but a ‘slightly more lethal’ substance was also kept on hand, just in case. ‘A five gallon drum of “Moth Doom”’, which had ‘proved successful in treating a very badly infected Chinese carpet recently and also a highly infected Ushak carpet’ was acquired and sent to Montacute.

The Ardabil, however, appears on a list of carpets headed ‘not to be sprayed and for frequent inspection’. Once in six months these objects should be unrolled and cleaned. But inspection of such a large object provided its own challenge. Four men were required for the task of moving the carpet. A large space was also needed, and the only place big enough was the courtyard of the house, so settled weather was also a necessary.

Muriel Clayton, the curator responsible for the carpets, investigated and reported back to the Director: ‘The Ardabil carpet, from which the wrapping at one end seemed to have been removed, contained several patches of eggs, but these I think were of this year's vintage and had done no damage.’

So, the Ardabil Carpet survived the moths, and the war, and returned to the museum where it remains today. The Museum of Islamic Art’s Caucasian dragon carpet was unfortunately not so lucky, but after painstaking work by conservators, can be appreciated once again. While their two experiences of the war might have been divergent, these two carpets have now been brought together, thanks to the visit of Fragment #72 to the museum.

Tracing Clues in Oxford

The Ashmolean is the University of Oxford's museum of art and archaeology, founded in 1683. Its world-famous collections range from Egyptian mummies to contemporary art, telling human stories across cultures and across time. The museum is thus ideally suited for a visit with the CulturalxCollabs project and Fragment #72 in tow. Additionally, since 2000, it has been home to the May Beattie Archive.

And a surprise: May Beattie also archived samples from our collection. For example, from two prayer rugs or the remnants of a Turkmen bag.

This illustrates how strong and important the global networking among researchers was and still is. Although sampling original objects is no longer as straightforward today, research results are shared directly, networks are expanded, and experiences are passed on.