A Note on Understanding Sikh Shawl Construction   Recently a knowledgeable client of mine requested some not-so-often-asked-for details of an interesting Sikh period long shawl I have ( see no. 163 under Kashmiri Shawls). To find the answers, which I must admit baffled me at the time, required some serious…

Eighty-five rare Kashmir shawls, formerly from the Sam Josefowitz collection of Switzerland were recently sold at Christies’ online auction.. Historically and as a group, it was perhaps the most important sale of such items to have ever been put on the market. From the high Mughal period of the 17thcentury…

197-A Gothic Couder     An explosively graphic showstopper that can’t help but dazzle! Amedèe Couder’s architectural talents are catapulted to vertigenous heights with this masterpiece. Perhaps his most famous rumal, the Isphahan, 1834, which contains quasi-buidings, is dated and signed with inscriptions in Farsi. However, from the point of…

Size: 106 cm x 145 cm The basic format follows in the pure Mughal tradition of a bouquet of flowers bursting in bloom from a decorative vase all within a graceful Islamic niche formed by an arch composed of cusped two-tone leaves coming from either side to join at a…

                            Perhaps crafted around 1860 or so this spectacular long shawl is truly a work of love and devotion by a single master craftsman whose painstaking efforts had to have taken him no less than ten years…

What’s exciting is that this could be one of the oldest moon shawls known. It’s certainly endowed with all the attributes of what we know about the early ones: tiny central and quarter medallions and an overall diminutive size. However, what makes it stand out from all others is its…