The advent of photography and illustrated materials had an enormous influence on other media, including rugs, other textiles, and tiles. Portraits of Farangi women started to appear on carpets around the turn of the 20th century, and represent an important segment of pictorial carpet art, possessing some of the qualities of the Pop Art movement of the 1960s. In order to understand this aspect of the depiction of Farangi women in Iran, a brief survey of the history of Iranian pictorial rugs will be useful.
Pictorial rugs appeared in Iran during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848-1896), initially in the urban rugweaving centers, including Kerman, Tabriz, Kashan, and Isfahan. The city rug-weavers would begin their work with a cartoon made by a commercial artist. Designers of pictorial rugs usually selected their subjects from paintings or photographs, and drew them on squared paper on the same scale as the rugs themselves (each square representing a rug knot). The painted cartoon was then given to the weaver. From this cartoon a number of rugs more or less similar to each other were usually woven. The subjects of city rugs are abundant and diverse. Most, however, consist of scenes from classical Iranian love stories, portraits of the shahs and dervishes, or other Iranian subjects.
Tribal and village weavers, who had no access to rug cartoonists, either borrowed a city-woven pictorial rug and copied it, or worked directly from a pictorial curtain or a large photograph. By glancing at the model periodically, the weaver would be given sufficient guidance for her own rug (except in cities, the weavers were all women.) In fact, she would not copy her model exactly, but improvised her own version of the colors, motifs, and general composition. This improvisation is one of the most important differences between the city rugs and the tribal and village rugs. The city weaver, in fact, was only an executer of the design, since everything was arranged and planned by a professional designer in advance, and followed without deviation by the city weaver. But the tribal and village weavers were free to vary aspects of the design as they saw fit.
Until recently, a color picture based on a European painting of the face of an idealized beautiful woman could often be seen in Iranian homes, shops, and tea houses (plate 134). These pictures were sometimes woven into rugs, in accordance with the wishes either of the weavers or of customers who placed special orders for the rugs. Rugs depicting the face of this beautiful woman at a large scale, dominating the entire field of the rug, constitute a small group of pictorial rugs.
Although in recent years pictures of beautiful women have been woven into carpets, there is a special reason behind the weaving of that particular early image. For a long time it was the image most favored by rug weavers, and it was called Fatima (plates 135—138). In the absence of concrete knowledge of the origins of that chromolithograph portrait of this unknown woman (plate 134), which inspired a number of pictorial rugs made in various parts of Iran from the late 19th to the mid-20th century, several speculative stories have circulated in different parts of the Middle East. In Iran it has been suggested that she is perhaps a Turk painted by a European during the late 19th century.
Others have believed her to represent Belkis, the Queen of Sheba, whose beauty and connection with King Solomon are famous. The Kurds of Iraq call her Kichi-Kafrosh, or the Mona Lisa of Kurdistan. According to their sources, KichiKafrosh was so beautiful and magnificent that in the early 20th century it was hard to find a Kurdish home without a painting of her hanging on the wall in at least one room. Today, every Kurd knows about Kichi-Kafrosh, whose name has become an idiom by which beautiful Kurdish girls are described. It is often said: "She is as beautiful as KichiKafrosh." The Kurds believe she was a Kurdish woman.
Culture of Divulgence: Mirror Rooms a Platform for Exposition
