The Design
A late seventeenth-century dastarkana—an Indian summer carpet hand-drawn in kalamkari and conserved at The Metropolitan Museum of Art—was the starting point for Mughal Poppy. Drawn down to three-fifths scale, every hand-painted line was translated to preserve the painterly look of the original kalam. Ground takes three-quarters of the surface, leaving wide, breathing fields around each plant so the density stays inside the motif without closing a room in.
The Source
Someone cut the original up. Twelve feet of hand-painted poppies, sliced into puzzle-piece shapes to fit around a column, or a tent post, or a smaller room—no one wrote down which. What reached the museum in 1982 was a little under half: plain-weave cotton from the Mughal period, mordant-painted and resist-dyed, the poppies drawn by hand rather than stamped from a block. Green was made by painting yellow over indigo. On most surviving kalamkaris the yellow is gone and only the blue is left; on this one it held.
It came in with the Alice and Nasli Heeramaneck Collection, a gift of Alice Heeramaneck, and then sat for thirty-two years because the border was too fragile to handle. Conservation ran past a hundred hours—the binding removed, tideline stains lifted with poultice, the cloth humidified flat until the creases relaxed. It went up in Gallery 464 in 2015, in the Department of Islamic Art, on a slanted board held by insect pins, because no one was willing to put a stitch through it.
The conservators chose not to join the fragments back together or reconstruct what was lost. That was deliberate, out of respect for what the object had actually lived through. The carpet as a whole stays broken. But the design was made to be lived with—walked on, sat beside, used—and it spent thirty-two years in a drawer. The fragments held a complete plant and the rhythm that placed it. That was enough to bring it back out.
It will never be a floorspread again. The poppies stop abruptly on a slant board in Gallery 464. Now they keep going—row after row, past the corner, the way they did before someone cut it up.
The Specifications
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Source: Fragment of a floorspread, late seventeenth century, India. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accession 1982.239a
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Repeat: 24 in (12 in half-drop)
