A virtual carpet in Charleston.(Brief Article)

Ralph Blakely, a carpet collector in Charleston has sent us an intriguing speculation regarding the presence of Oriental rugs in that city in the eighteenth centruy. He bases his very plausible argument on a comparison of the portraits illustrated here, writing:

Considering the extravagant tastes of the cosmopolitan, sybaritic Charleston rice planters, Oriental carpets would hardly have been omitted from the lists of luxury goods they bought while abroad and shipped home. Yet in the few surviving Charleston inventories from the period there is no mention of Oriental carpets, nor do any such carpets, or fragments of them, remain in Charleston.

Intriguing evidence of their use in Charleston is offered, however, by two portraits of the Charleston planter and merchant Henry Laurens. The first (upper left) was painted by John Singleton Copley in London; the second (lower right) is a copy of that likeness painted in Charleston in 1803 by Charles Fraser, an artist who had never seen Copley's original.

One of the wealthiest Americans of his day, Laurens served as president of the Continental Congress in 1777 and 1778, directed Benjamin Franklin in negotiating an alliance with France in 1778, and, while traveling to Holland to negotiate a treaty and a loan in 1780, was captured by the British on the high seas. Charged with treason, he was imprisoned in the Tower of London and released late in 1781 in exchange for Lord Cornwallis who had been captured by Washington at Yorktown. In 1782, before his return to Charleston, Laurens sat for Copley's portrait.

The portrait was painted so that Valentine Green could make mezzotint engraving from it to be sold with Green's engraving of George Washington as a souvenir commemorating the founding of the American Republic. Washington represented the military and Lourens the parliamentary branch of the government Lourens never took possession of the painting himself, but he did buy copies of the engraving forhrs family.

In the painting Laurens is depicted as though he had just left the presence of Louis XVI of France. He wears a powdered wig and a suit of purple silk velvet, the correct color for the representative of a republic to wear since it was the color of the stripes on a Roman senator's toga. His armchair and footstool are of gilded wood and both are upholstered with greenish blue velvet. There is a bluish-green drapery across the top of the painting, and an Italiante landscape of coniferous trees in the left background.

In front of Laurens is a table covered with a Turkish carpet of the kind usually called Bergama. The field is not apparent, but all of the borders show The devices in the borders are typical of Bergama rug, and it is clear from the corner that there was no reconciliation of the side and end borders, also consistent with Bergama rugs. The palette is entirely typical of the se carpets--madder red, dark blue, light blue mustard yellow, brown, and ...