Unknown Maker, Persian

The small floral sprays dancing across the interior of this Persian sash closely approximate those adorning the adjacent Indian woman’s sari and man’s robe. The designs and the use of gold thread illustrate the fluid exchange between Indian Mughal and Persian court cultures through the 19th century. Royal Indian workshops supported traditional Persian craftsmanship, with Mughal rulers of northern India importing not only Persian court artisans for their own royal weaving workshops but motifs such as the Persian flowering tree, or buta. Over centuries, this realistic floral motif became the stylized, teardrop-shaped mass of swirling vegetation known in Europe as paisley.

The visual relationship is readily apparent between the floral sprays gracing this Mughal sash and those depicted on Jones’s plate, taken from a Persian manufacturer’s pattern book at the South Kensington Museum, London. Having spent time in Persia’s courts, the first Muslim conquerors brought with them to India a preference for what Jones describes as the “great simplicity and ingenuity displayed in the conventional rendering of natural flowers” in Persian art. At the hands of India’s master weavers and designers, the floral spray developed over the course of the 19th century into a larger flowering plant motif called a buta (note the Indian skirt on view here); and then, responding to the European market, into the well-known paisley motif, seen as a teardrop-shaped mass of swirling vegetation in the large shawl in this gallery.