Hi all,
A very late animal rug.
William Larkin was an early seventeenth century artist who painted a dozen of full length portraits of members of the English upper aristocracy belonging to the same family. The paintings feature a number of spectacular rugs. Larkin’s patron and likely owner of the rugs, perhaps the Earl of Dorset, might well be one of the Great Ancestors of the Ruggie family, together with Hans Memling and Cardinal Wolsey. We will come back to Larkin and «his» rugs in a later essay. Let me mention here only one of his paintings:
William Larkin. Portrait of Lady Dorothy Cary, ca. 1615. Kenwood House, London.
The beautiful carpet on which Lady Cary is standing (there is another one behind her) could have been one of the thirteenth and fourteenth century stylized animal rugs discussed in this thread. However, it would be insulting for British moths to believe that a rug could still be in this apparently pristine state after two or three centuries. Could the tradition of animal rugs have been kept alive for a while by the weavers of its original ethnic group?
Best regards
Pierre