Victoria's Parlour Antiques

Victoria's Parlour Antiques

Belleair Bluffs business owner grew up in the rug business

By Christina K. Cosdon, Times Correspondent
In Print: Sunday, January 18, 2009

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Pat France’s rug collection includes more than 200 rugs from all around the world, some of which are a century old.
	[ATOYIA DEANS | Times]

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Jewelry, glass and pottery, lamps, paintings, wall hangings and bric-a-brac crowd the aisles and walls of Victoria's Parlour Antiques. But the heart of the business is a back room jammed with a jumble of Oriental rugs, some standing upright in rolls, others on open stacks. The only way to see the sizes, shapes, colors and designs of the rugs is to thumb through books featuring them in more than 200 photographs.

Pat France grew up in the rug business and has spent a lifetime developing an eye and taste for them. Her collection represents every major rug-making area in the world, she says. Some are a century old.

"I have a lot of Persian rugs, some Turkish, Armenian, some Chinese," she said. Styles range from art deco to traditional and modern.

When France was a child, her playground was a store filled with more than a thousand wool and silk rugs from around the world — Paulson & Co., a family business in Swarthmore, Pa., established by her grandfather in 1914.

From age 4, she played on the store's rugs, watched them being cleaned and saw them displayed for customers.

On family outings to museums with her brother and sister, "we would always play a game," she recalled. "Whatever was on the walls — paintings or rugs — we would have to describe why we liked it, whether it was the beauty of the colors, the clarity of the design or something about it that caught our senses."

Seeking a warmer climate, Wesley and Dorothy France left their hometown of Swarthmore in 1957, moved to Largo with their three children and started France Rugs.

At the time, Pat France was 8 years old and entered Mildred Helms Elementary School.

She worked summers in the family store as a teenager and after graduating from Florida Southern College in 1971, she joined the business.

When she turned 20, her uncle, Paul Paulson, invited her on a buying and selling trip to New York City. The only room for her was in the back of the truck on top of rugs.

It's one of her fondest memories.

"It was the neatest experience," she said. "We would stop at a dozen places a day. I got to go into all the showrooms and warehouses and see how different people do business."

She also learned the art of rug repair and reweaving. Her teacher was award-winning artist Mildred "Muggsy" Kelso, who learned her craft at the Philadelphia Institute of Art.

When her parents retired in 1984, some of the rugs went to the family store in Swarthmore and Pat France took some when she started her own business that same year in Antique Alley in Belleair Bluffs.

"For years, I had customers that I inherited from my parents," she said. "I've always liked the challenge of finding things for people. I brought paintings and jewelry for one customer, then her kids and now her grandkids."

With the changing economy, her buying has become more selective.

"I used to buy everything under the sun. Now I'm much more particular, much more critical," she said.

"I buy as high quality as I can or something that's really unique. Things have to have something extra to sell these days. Usual isn't going to cut it."

Chris Cosdon can be reached at ccosdon@gmail.com.

Victoria's Parlour Antiques

Where: 568 N Indian Rocks Road, Belleair Bluffs.

Hours: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday.

For more information: Call (727) 581-0519.

Kish to host 3rd intl. hand-woven carpet exhibit in April

Kish to host 3rd intl. hand-woven carpet exhibit

TEHRAN (IRNA) -- The 3rd Kish International Hand-woven Carpet Exhibition is slated to be held in Kish Island in April.

A number of domestic and foreign companies have voiced their readiness to take part in the event.

In the four-day exhibition, domestic and foreign companies will showcase their products in an area of 21,000 square meters.

Some 155 domestic and foreign companies attended in the 2nd Kish carpet exhibition sponsored by Kish Free Trade Zone, Iran Carpet Company, Persian Carpet Association, Central Association of Persian Hand Woven Producers and Rural Carpet Cooperative Company.

Foreign companies from China, India, Syria, Afghanistan, and Pakistan attended the 2nd expo.

What makes a carpet Jewish?

Don’t Tread on Me

What makes a carpet Jewish?

By Jeannie Rosenfeld

A Kashan Pictorial Silk Rug, 1850s, depicting King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba

Jews may be “the people of the book,” but their relationship to textiles predates the book itself. In Exodus, God provides detailed instructions for the creation of a rug-like partition to be woven of turquoise, purple, and scarlet wool and linen, embellished with cherubs, and hung in the portable sanctuary that accompanied the Israelites as they wandered through the desert. Wherever they settled and dispersed, Jews never lost their knack for textile production.

As early as the first century A.D., Baruch Albalia, a prince of Judea and expert silk weaver, was sent by Titus, the Roman general who conquered Jerusalem, to develop the textile industry in Spain. When the Jews were expelled from there in 1492, many of them found refuge in the Ottoman Empire, where for centuries the dyers, weavers and traders among them built a reputation for creating the most extraordinary carpets in the world. Anecdotal evidence of Jewish textile expertise abounds: from ledgers revealing that in the Hungarian town of Nagykoros, most of the carpets purchased between 1630 and 1682 came from Jewish sellers, to records of the Pope granting a patent for silk manufacturing to the Italian Jew Meir Magino around the same time. Across cultures, it seems, Jews were famous craftsman before they established their reputation as merchants, and while fabricating designs for their gentile neighbors, they also created some fascinating pieces for themselves.

Yet rugs and carpets (a distinction purely of size) are hardly the first things that come to mind when considering Judaica. This may reflect their scarcity, compared with more common and easily portable objects like Kiddush cups and menorahs. Or it may reflect their relatively folksy character, sometimes bordering on kitsch—an aesthetic linked to the limitations of a medium defined by stitches rather than brushstrokes, and alternately hung like tapestries or walked upon. But it also stems from the misconception that Judaic examples were anomalies among Oriental and European carpets.

Anton Felton, a British collector-turned-scholar, challenged that misconception with his 1997 book Jewish Carpets. “Everyone thought I was mad, but I spent 50 years proving my point,” says Felton, who acquired his first piece while moonlighting as a bookkeeper for London carpet dealers in the 1960s. That piece—a silk rug from Kashan (circa 1850s) depicting King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba surrounded by symbols of the 12 tribes and episodes from Jewish history—so intrigued Felton that he convinced his employer to let him work it off rather than sell it to either of the parties vying for it: then-chief Rabbi Israel Brodie and philanthropist Sir Isaac Wilson.

He went on to scour the world in search of Jewish carpets, accumulating some 60 for his personal trove and researching more than 200 in public and private holdings. The one that started it all—and, Felton says, brought him “back to Judaism”—was the star among 18 lots of rugs and carpets from his collection featured in Sotheby’s December 17th Judaica sale; it fetched $23,750. (This annual Judaica auction usually features only one or two, if any, rugs and carpets, so despite the fact that only six of the 18 lots sold, it was a major event.)

Who would have thought a rug could be an object of Jewish faith? Felton makes a strong case for Jewish carpets as a distinctive category, rather than—as he recalls being suggested to him during his years of research—“abominations that cropped up by chance at the interface of two cultures.” Much was no doubt lost over time, but those examples that can be tracked down offer tremendous insight into Jewish history and iconography. “I don’t just look at a Jewish carpet, I try to look through it,” Felton explains. “I ask, what was the culture that produced it? What did it mean to the people who owned it and looked at it?” But all this very serious research begs the question: what really makes a carpet Jewish?

The Song of Songs, A Marbadiah Wool Rug, Jerusalem, 1920–1921, centered with a stylized palm tree against a blue filed inhabited by flora and fauna, the border enclosing peacocks flanking fountains alternating with grape clusters

Taking a broad view, the field encompasses secular pieces by Jewish artisans, along with works by non-Jews used in Jewish settings (like a purely decorative carpet used to adorn a synagogue). Getting more specific, they feature inherently Jewish motifs: stars of David, menorahs, torah crowns, biblical scenes, views of Jerusalem, and Hebrew writing. There also seems to be a spiritual aspect to these decorative works, most obviously in devotional textiles such as the sheviti (a textual reminder of the divine presence) and mizrach (to indicate the Eastern direction for prayer), mounted at home and in synagogues. Workshops established in the 20th century, meanwhile, found carpet design a surprisingly suitable medium for promoting social change.

The Bezalel School of Arts and Crafts, founded by Boris Schatz in Jerusalem in 1906, and its offshoot, Marbadiah (in existence from 1920 to 1931), were influential in melding Oriental and European carpet traditions with imagery that tied Jewish identity to the budding homeland. The resulting works account for the vast majority of existing Jewish carpets—and also the bulk of the group in Sotheby’s sale. In some pieces, the Judaic elements are subtle, while others that feature biblical passages or images of Jerusalem put forward the possibility of a modern Jewish nation in an ancient land.

Around the same time, charitable institutions like the Alliance Israelite Universelle (founded by French Jews in 1860 to foster social mobility and combat anti-Semitism) and the socialist-minded Organization for Rehabilitation Through Training (founded two decades later in St. Petersburg with the goal of alleviating poverty) employed and trained Jewish carpet-makers throughout the world. Sotheby’s auction included a series of chenille rugs made by the Alliance featuring portraits of Zionist figures like Theodore Herzl, Chaim Weizmann, Lord Balfour, and Sir Herbert Samuel—the first practicing Jew to become a British cabinet minister and later High Commissioner under the British Mandate of Palestine. These idealized depictions feature richly hued red and gold tones and elaborate Oriental borders, but primarily serve as wonderful historical documents—almost like commemorative postage stamps—which may explain why they failed to sell.

While these later examples aren’t the pinnacle of carpet-making, they hold their own against most contemporaneous examples. Similarly, more luxurious—but much rarer—earlier Jewish carpets from Persia and Turkey are indistinguishable from their Islamic counterparts in style, if not in substance. In the West as early as the 10th century, the rise of the church led to the creation of the guild system, shutting Jews out of creative professions. But in the major carpet production regions of the East, they were sought out for their trade secrets and skill. This explains the striking similarities between Jewish and Islamic carpets; experts presume that they were largely commissioned and made by the same workshops and individuals. Case in point: a circa-1920 Kashan silk rug featuring an elaborate depiction of the binding of Isaac was offered in Sotheby’s general carpet auction this past June. The non-Jewish consignor had acquired it purely for its aesthetic appeal and relevance to his broader Persian carpet collection, but it sparked aggressive bidding and surpassed its conservative $5,000–$7,000 estimate to fetch $20,000 from a Jewish buyer. Perhaps it also helps answer the more basic if less central question of why so many carpet dealers in New York, Los Angeles, London, and other international cities are Jews of Persian and Turkish descent. Craftsmanship apparently paved the way for trade.

“I looked at all the major places where carpets were woven in the Mediterranean and all the major Jewish settlements, and blow me down if 99 percent of the time they aren’t the same,” Anton Felton remarks. Even as the definition of home has proved impermanent, carpets have remained an integral form of Jewish artistic and religious expression—not to mention a quintessentially Jewish livelihood.

Jeannie Rosenfeld, a former editor at Art + Auction magazine, is a New York writer specializing in fine and decorative art. Her work has appeared in ARTnews, Interior Design, and the Forward.

Photos courtesy of Sotheby's New York.

Mottahed Almas carpets capture ATF visitor’s attention

Mottahed Almas carpets capture ATF visitor’s attention

December 26, 2008 (Oman)

In the Autumn Trade Fair (ATF) 2008, at the Oman International Exhibition Centre, carpets manufactured by Mottahed Almas Company LLC, were quite appreciated by the onlookers. According to Dr Amin Omidghaemi, Chairman of the Group, the Company sold 25 finest carpets with in 4 hours of the opening day of ATF 2008. Mottahed Almas Company LLC, from Iran, is a joint venture between Omani Building Material Centre (OBMC) and Mottahed Almas Company Int'l. It manufactures and exports high quality Persian rugs and carpets world wide. Currently the Company has more than 10 factories that produce best Persian carpets to cater to the demand of the global market. Mottahed Almas, after its inception in 2005, witnessed a gradual growth in its sales. In the year 2007, the Company saw a growth rate of 80 percent and in the current fiscal expects the rate to surge by massive 500 percent. Presently, observing the increasing love for the Persian carpets in the global market, the Company aims to expand its bases in Philippines, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

Iran's Art of Carpet Weaving in Tashkent

Tashkent Hosts Iran Carpet Exhibition

TEHRAN (FNA)- An exhibition titled "Iran's Art of Carpet Weaving" opened in Tashkent Saturday with a speech by Iran's ambassador's wife to the country, Monir Keshavarz-zadeh.


Referring to the role of Iranian civilization and art in the development of world's culture and civilization, she elaborated on the Iranian carpet weaving industry.

The event does not merely seek to showcase Iranian carpet; rather it aims to hail the spirituality governing this and other branches of art, which promotes peace and stability among the peoples, the Islamic republic news agency reported.

The exhibition was attended by the wives of the ambassadors to Uzbekistan, women officials of the country, Iranologists and Persian- speaking instructors and students.

Italy exhibits Persian carpets

Italy exhibits Persian carpets
Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:15:36 GMT

Milan's 13th Int'l Crafts Selling Exhibition displays Persian carpets.

Iran has participated in the 13th edition of the International Crafts Selling Exhibition at the New Exhibition Center of Milan, Italy.

Iran's pavilion has been set up by the country's National Carpet Center and features precious Persian carpets.

The event, which kicked off on Nov. 30, 2008 includes over 3,000 pavilions belonging to some 106 countries from around the globe.

Iran's Consul-General in Italy, Ali Hashemi-Kafil, who attended the inauguration ceremony, welcomed visitors and informed them about the 3,000-year history of carpet weaving in the country.

Three million people are expected to visit the exhibition, which will run until December 8, 2008.