Item Girls (or The Two Levitating Carpets from the Shah Jahan Period at the Frick)

Two carpets hang on the walls of the Frick Collection in New York accompanied by a textual description that begins as follows: “Made with silk and pashmina wool in 17th century northern India, these two carpets are the Frick’s most important works of art of Asian origin.” Known for its premiere collection of European paintings, a la Vermeers, Rembrandt, and Titian, it is strange to see this sudden mention of “Asian art” which disappears as quickly as it appears, two Indian carpets and some Chinese porcelain later. It gets stranger as one reads about the details of the journey of these carpets from the floor to the wall.

The two rugs at the Frick date from the reign of Shah Jahan (1628–58) and were probably made at the imperial workshop in Lahore. The larger of the two, which is decorated with rows of trees was sent as a gift to the tomb mosque of Sheikh Safi in Ardabil in Persia by Shah Jahan himself. In 1918 Henry Clay Frick bought the rugs from a dealer named Joseph Duveen, for $39,050 (for the larger one) and $19,000 (for the smaller). To place these prices in perspective, at the same time as he purchased the rugs, he purchased a portrait by Thomas Gainsborough from the same dealer for $300,000. The carpets were intended to furnish his house at 1 East 70th Street and were placed in the library. When the Frick home became a museum, the carpets remained floor furnishings, as until 2001 “one was on the floor in the Boucher Room under the Riesener desk.” In 2001 the decision was made to carefully restore these rugs, place them behind glass, and elevate them to “works of art” to be viewed on the wall. Mere fragments of the larger carpet which did not make it into the large restored carpet at the Frick are suddenly so valuable that they have appeared in the collections major museums around the world, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The Victoria & Albert Museum in London, The Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum fur Islamische Kunst in Berlin.

Self-Portrait as Mumtaz Mahal on a Carpet from the Shah Jahan Period at the Frick (Untimely Death) // 2023
Oil on jute, silk, thread
48 x 83 inches

Currently in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA): Gift of Prince Bhojwani, M.2025.212

Self-Portrait as Mumtaz Mahal on a Carpet from the Shah Jahan Period at the Frick (Smelling a Flower) // 2023
Oil on jute, silk, thread 
75.5 x 92.75 inches

Currently in the Portland Museum of Art: Gift of Rahul M. Sabhnani, 2024.13

Item Number 8027 A to K at Museum für Islamische Kunst in Berlin, Item Number 08.109.20 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Item Number 2004.111 at the Brooklyn Museum in New York, & Item Number T.148 to D-1958 at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London // 2023

Oil on burlap, thread
Dimensions variable, from 14 x 9 x 1.75 inches to 32 x 32 x 1.75 in

These set of paintings are oil painted facsimiles of the two carpets at the Frick as well as of some of the scattered fragments of the carpets belonging to major institutional collections around the world. These painted carpets feature self portraits as Mumtaz Mahal, the wife of the Mughal emperor in whose workshops the original rugs were made. While there are no surviving contemporary portraits of Mumtaz Mahal, she is popularly depicted smelling a flower, hence the depiction on the larger carpet. As with many women in history, little is known about Mumtaz except that she was the favorite wife of Shah Jahan and died shortly after giving birth to her fourteenth child in 1631. The following year, the emperor began work on the mausoleum that would house her body, the world-famous Taj Mahal. Thus, the depiction of Mumtaz’s corpse lays on the smaller carpet, the form in which she is most “remembered.”