NATIONAL PARK SERVICE The Most Splendid Carpet

Borders

With the "land and marine" trophies, documentary information in the written description of the Senate carpet ends, leaving many details to the imagination. What the borders of the original Senate carpet may have been like, or whether it had other ornamentation within these borders, the eighteenth century correspondent does not divulge. What is certain is that the borders and additional ornamentation of the Lansdowne family of Axminster carpets were eminently neoclassical, appeared in other carpets of the period, and that their choice for the hypothetical reconstruction of the Senate carpet is in keeping with the rest of the design.

The layout of the Lansdowne type carpets, in geometrical sections with strong verticals as well as a horizontal sweep, is characteristic of other carpets of the period, from the carpet at Syon House dating from 1758 to those at Harewood House, made some thirty years later at the beginning of the 1790's. The principal compartments are separated into rectangular, circular, and diamond shapes by clean lines, uncluttered by projecting forms or busy naturalistic representations, as austere and unemotional in their own way as the columns, pediments, and architraves of Palladian architecture. Thus these separating lines, the borders of the compartments, take on great importance as delineators, defining and emphasizing the orderly symmetry of the overall design. How right and proper that they should find their origins in classical architecture, and particularly in the wall paintings studied by the neoclassicists in Rome and Herculaneum, and popularized in England by the prolific Robert Adam.

The outer guard border at the very edge of the Lansdowne carpet is a two-dimensional reflection of the cornice moldings of classical architecture; two stripes, one dark, one lighter, give a firm and solid edge enclosing the decorated space of the carpet, just as these moldings did on ancient buildings. It is also a border which appears frequently in other carpets attributed to the Axminster factory.

The inner guard border, next to the main border, is drawn from those borders at Pompeii and Herculaneum which separated walls and ceilings into harmonious compartments essential to the breaking up of an expanse of space for decoration with small paintings of figures "en vignette." Here the "husk" chain, or string of bellflowers, appeared again and again. Robert Adam borrowed it directly and used it frequently; he festooned the Axminster carpet for the music room at Harewood House with swags of it in the central area, and at Saltram it is once again a guard border like the ones in the Lansdowne carpets. In the Senate Chamber of 1791, the cornice was dentilled and there was no other decoration, but in 1793 when the room was enlarged, a bellflower frieze was added, an indication, perhaps, that it was a repeat motif, so that in typical neoclassical fashion, it would have matched other elements of the room's design.

In Oriental carpets, borders like these can frequently be indicators of place of manufacture, but in the instance of English carpets, borders seem to have been pirated and copied back and forth by various makers. A case in point is the main border of the Lansdowne carpet, which has been cut off the carpet in the Metropolitan Museum but which remains on several other versions including the carpet in the Victoria and Albert Museum. This border of repeated diamond shapes occurs commonly at Herculaneum, and embellished with rosettes, is found in the Adam-designed Axminster carpets at Saltram, in the Adam-Thomas Moore carpets at Osterley Park, and in a drawing by Adam for a carpet for Shelburne House, London. The design occurs in the Lansdowne type carpets and appears again in precisely the same form in a carpet for Carleton House, now in the Royal Collections. At first, on the basis of this border, the Carleton House carpet was attributed to Axminster, but it has recently been found to be by Thomas Moore, and has his characteristic counting warps. [25]

Two other borders were borrowed from the Lansdowne carpet for the Senate carpet reconstruction: the Vitruvian scroll surrounding the trophies, and the fasces around the chain of states in the center. The Vitruvian scroll appears frequently in classical ornament and particularly in mosaics at Herculaneum, where Robert Adam adopted it for his repertoire. It appears in his furniture designs, and is found in his music room carpet at Harewood House, where it also occurs in the ceiling decoration.

The fasces border around the central medallion was a classical motif as well, a symbol of authority carried before Roman magistrates. At the same time, it was a neoclassical favorite; an example is the luxurious Thomas Moore carpet at Osterley Park designed by Robert Adam, which also has a center fasces border.

Finally, the Senate carpet has one other conjectural element of ornamentation based on the Lansdowne carpet which did not appear in the newspaper description; this is the rinceau scroll design which appears in the corners of the trophy compartments. Again, these motifs derive from wall paintings and mosaics at Herculaneum and Rome, and were a well-established element of neoclassical design. Engraved by Robert Adam and by Giambattista Piranesi from Roman examples, the rinceau was an easy motif to adapt for decorative use, especially to fill in spandrel shaped corners, as in the Lansdowne carpet. If any motif can be called a neoclassical cliche, it is the rinceau. They are everywhere in the designs of Robert Adam and the drawings of designers associated with him such as Michael Angelo Pergolesi.

Any discussion of the Senate carpet cannot be complete without mention of the brilliant and varied colors therein. From the paid bills of 1793, it was obvious that part of the carpet had a black ground, and part a green ground, since these colors were employed in its repair. Some hypothesizing, with the aid of arithmetic using yardage figures, suggested that the central compartment had been black, and the side compartments green. At first, one thought of Robert Adam's color schemes for ceilings, which included many, but subdued, colors. Looking more closely at Axminster carpets, however, the range and depth, in fact nearly garish intensity, of colors (now faded to a surface pastel) suggested that the Senate carpet had been very colorful indeed. A careful inventory of Axminster colors showed that an infinity of shades was proper for a 1790's date, but that several colors predominated. The Lansdowne family of carpets and the Axminsters at Saltram House and Harewood House were especially important in determining colors used in the conjectural reproduction of the Senate carpet, particularly in the choice of greens for the background of the trophy compartments, and the pinks of the border and the trophy sections themselves. Some twenty-eight colors appear in the reproduction carpet, all of which are based on Axminster colors of the 1770-1790 period.

FIGURE 46: Axminster carpet of the "Lansdowne type," c. 1775. Courtesy of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.