Tent Hanging (Qanat)

Northern India
(Rajasthan, probably Jaipur)
early 18th century

Length: 490 cm
Width: 95 cm

A block-printed, mordant-dyed and painted cotton tent hanging (qanat) with a design of a tall and elegant floral spray within a multi-cusped arch. The stem rises from a leafy mound at the base of the design to shoot upwards to a towering height, bearing leaves and poppy flowers emerging in bud or bursting into full bloom, seen in nodding side-profile to the left and right and crowned by a flower-head of radiating petals to the top. From the calyx of each poppy dangle a pair of hyacinth-like stamen clusters. The tall plant is flanked by two smaller flowering plants with lily-like flowers. Cascading down against the plain ground on all sides of the plant as if blazing with flames are chinoiserie cloud bands (t’chi).

The spandrels of the arch are decorated with scrolling floral arabesques. The narrow vertical borders are decorated with inverted omega shapes of green serrated leaves enclosing red trefoils. A red panel with a trellis of leaves and flowers framed by a scrolling border above anchors the design at its base.

This tent hanging is part of a well-known series of chintzes, examples of which are held by important museums and private collections world-wide. The qanat panels would originally have formed the interior of at least one, or possibly two, spectacular tents, providing the decoration for a piece of royal temporary architecture that would almost certainly have been plain red on the outside. The Mughal imperial court was a peripatetic court that travelled regularly and the emperors had entire portable cities create from textiles in the form of camps with tents for every purpose. The court’s audience rooms, workshops, kitchens, storage and private apartments were all to be found under canvas, waterproof on the outside and hung with rich fabrics, velvets and chintzes of high quality inside. In this example, the brush strokes are broad and bold to impress petitioners from a distance, so is likely to have been destined for a public hall to make an impression on the subjects of the rulers.

According to Joseph M. Dye, who writes of a tent hanging from the group in the collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Francois Bernier notes in 1664 that the royal enclosure of Aurangzeb’s camp was surrounded by fabric screens or tents walls seven or eight feet in height: “These kanates are of strong cloth which was lined with chittes [chintz] or cloths painted with portals with a great vase of flowers”.(1) The emperor’s private quarters were enclosed by small qanats, while “beautiful chittes of painted flowers” lined the interiors of other tents. Bernier further noted the construction method of wooden posts staked into the ground in pairs ten paces apart, one on the inside of the tent and one on the outside, leaning against each other for stability and the cloth screens held fast by ropes attached to the stakes.(2) In a joined panel of three qanats in a private collection in London, the attachments for the support poles are still retained.(3)

The largest from this group of qanats is the composite tent-hanging now in the Tapi Collection in Surat, composed of six separate floral panels stitched together with four corner fragments and additional border strips. In her analysis of the Tapi hanging, Rosemary Crill observes that all the panels have sloping tops to fit neatly with their matching counterparts that would have formed the opposite inner wall of the tent.(4) The two longest panels that make up this arrangement are 450 cm long and would have met at the highest part of the tent. According to Crill, several more pieces of this length are known. At 490 cm, the present qanat must be one of the tallest pieces to have survived and originally destined to hang from the apex of the tent.

Published examples include the Virginia Museum panel, in Joseph M. Dye III, The Arts of India: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2001, p. 467, cat. no. 224; two panels and a slanting fragment in the Collection A.E.D.T.A, Association pour l’Etude et la Documentation des Textiles d’Asia, Paris, in Krishna Riboud, Amina Okada and Marie-Hélène Guelton, Le Motif Floral dans les Tissus Moghols: Inde XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 1995, pls. 1, 2 and 3; the Tapi composite tent-hanging in Ruth Barnes, Steven Cohen and Rosemary Crill, Trade, Temple & Court: Indian Textiles from the Tapi Collection, 2002, pp. 160-161, no. 62; and two panels in the Calico Museum of Textiles, Ahmedabad, in John Irwin and Margaret Hall, Indian Painted and Printed Fabrics: Historic Textiles of India in the Calico Museum, Volume I, 1971, p. 30, no. 20, pl. 10.

Provenance:

Robert Kime.

References:

1. Joseph M. Dye III, The Arts of India: Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2001, p. 467.
2. Krishna Riboud, Amina Okada and Marie-Hélène Guelton, Le Motif Floral dans les Tissus Moghols: Inde XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles, 1995, pl. 2.
3. Veronica Murphy in Robert Skelton et al, The Indian Heritage: Court life and Arts under Mughal Rule, 1982, pp. 84-85, no. 212, discussed in relation to a panel lent by Lisbeth Holmes to the exhibition.
4. Ruth Barnes, Steven Cohen and Rosemary Crill, Trade, Temple & Court: Indian Textiles from the Tapi Collection, 2002, p. 160.