The Most Expensive Rugs in the World
The most expensive rug ever sold at auction is the Clark Sickle-Leaf carpet, a seventeenth-century Persian piece from the Kerman region, which made $33.8 million at Sotheby's New York on 5 June 2013. The four other record holders are Safavid Persian and Mughal Indian court weavings, and the greatest of all are in museums and will never be sold.
Five sales account for almost everything written about rug prices, and the numbers attached to them are usually wrong by a factor of two. What follows is each record with the price, the house, the date and the buyer where the buyer is public, then the pieces that are worth more than any of them and have no price at all. One note on wording: auction houses and museums say carpet, and the proper names stay as they were given — the Ardabil Carpet, the Pearl Carpet of Baroda. Everywhere else on this page a rug is a rug.
The record: the Clark Sickle-Leaf carpet, $33.8 million
It sold on 5 June 2013 at Sotheby's New York, tripling the previous record in a single lot. The carpet is seventeenth-century Persian, attributed to Kerman and woven in the vase technique, with a red ground and a lattice built from long curved leaves — the sickle leaves that give it its name — set against palmettes. It is one of a small handful of survivors of its type in anything like this condition.
Its name comes from William A. Clark, the Montana copper industrialist and United States senator whose collection was left to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington in 1926. The Corcoran consigned it. The buyer was an anonymous telephone bidder and has never been identified.
The four that follow it
Two of the four sold in London, one in New York and one in Doha, and only one of the buyers is a matter of record.
| Rug | Price | House and city | Date | Buyer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clark Sickle-Leaf carpet, 17th c. Persian (Kerman) | $33.8 million | Sotheby's, New York | 5 June 2013 | Anonymous telephone bidder; consigned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art |
| Kerman "vase" carpet, 17th c. Persian | £6.2 million ($9.6 million) | Christie's, London | 15 April 2010 | Undisclosed |
| Vanderbilt millefleur "star-lattice" carpet, late 17th–early 18th c. Mughal India | £4,786,500 ($7.6 million) | Christie's, London | 8 October 2013 | Undisclosed |
| Pearl Carpet of Baroda, India, c. 1865 | $5.5 million | Sotheby's, Doha | March 2009 | Anonymous |
The Kerman vase carpet held the record from 2010 until the Clark sale took it three years later, and it sold for more than twenty times its estimate. The Vanderbilt piece is a millefleur carpet — a dense field of small flowers under a star lattice — from a group of about a dozen known examples. It hung in Cornelius Vanderbilt II's house at 1 West 57th Street in New York and stayed in the family for more than a century before it came to auction.
The Pearl Carpet of Baroda, which is not really a rug
It was commissioned around 1865 by Khande Rao Gaekwad, Maharaja of Baroda, and it is a jeweler's work rather than a weaver's. The ground is silk and deer hide. Onto it are sewn something in the order of 1.5 million natural Basra seed pearls from the Gulf, with roughly 2,500 table-cut and rose-cut diamonds, foil-backed rubies, emeralds and sapphires, and English colored glass beads. It measures about 173 × 264 cm (5'8" × 8'8"). The Maharaja is said to have intended it for the Prophet's tomb at Medina and died before it was sent. Sotheby's sold it in Doha in March 2009 for $5.5 million to an anonymous buyer.
The ones that will never come up for sale
The two most important rugs in the world are in museums, and neither has a price.
The Ardabil Carpet is dated 946 in the Islamic calendar — 1539–40 — and signed by Maqsud of Kashan, which makes it the earliest explicitly dated Persian carpet known. It was made as one of a pair. By the 1890s one had been badly damaged, and a British dealer rebuilt the better carpet using material cut from its twin. That restored piece went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1893, for £2,000, after William Morris pressed the museum to buy it; it measures 1,044 × 535 cm (34'3" × 17'6") and carries roughly 26 million knots at 300 to 350 knots per square inch. What was left of the second carpet, now 23'7" × 13'1" and borderless on two sides, passed through Duveen to J. Paul Getty for about $70,000 and is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The pair sit eight thousand kilometers apart, one whole at the other's expense.
The Pazyryk carpet is older by two millennia. It was cut from the ice of a Scythian burial mound in the Altai mountains and is now in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, and it is knotted symmetrically — the same Gördes knot Anatolian weavers still use. We have written about it separately in the Pazyryk rug, the oldest knotted rug known.
What actually produces a price like that
Not knot count, and not size. Six things, and a record needs most of them at once.
- Type, not just age. A four-hundred-year-old rug is not rare; a four-hundred-year-old Kerman vase-technique carpet with its field intact is, because perhaps a few dozen fragments and a handful of complete examples survive.
- Condition. Court carpets were walked on. The ones that reach eight figures spent most of their lives on a wall or in a chest.
- Attribution. A date, a workshop or a signature moves a piece from a category into a specific object. The Ardabil is what it is because Maqsud signed it.
- Provenance. An unbroken chain of owners — the Corcoran, the Vanderbilts — removes doubt, and doubt is the thing bidders actually price.
- Publication. Pieces that have been exhibited and written about in the scholarly literature carry that record with them.
- Who is in the room. Four or five museums and a dozen collectors compete for objects at this level. Two of them wanting the same lot is the whole difference between $9 million and $33 million.
What it tells you about buying a rug, and what it does not
It tells you what the top of the market rewards: rarity of type, condition, and a documented history. Those are the same qualities that separate a good hand-knotted rug from an ordinary one, at any price.
What it does not tell you is that rugs go up. Record sales are the visible tail of a market whose ordinary pieces trade slowly, at a wide spread between what a dealer pays and what a dealer asks, and with auction fees on both sides. A good handwoven rug is durable, rare in the sense that no two are identical, and resaleable — but it should be bought because you want to live with it, not because you expect it to earn. We have set out what does and does not carry value in the piece on choosing a collectible rug.
The scale is also worth keeping in proportion. A Safavid court carpet and a rug woven in Anatolia last winter start in the same place: wool, a vertical loom, and a person tying knots one at a time. The gap between them is age, rarity and history, and only one of those can be bought. Our rare and collected rugs and pure silk rugs are where that end of the house begins.
Frequently asked questions
What is the most expensive rug ever sold?
The Clark Sickle-Leaf carpet, a seventeenth-century Persian carpet attributed to Kerman, sold for $33.8 million at Sotheby's New York on 5 June 2013. It was consigned by the Corcoran Gallery of Art and bought by an anonymous telephone bidder.
Why was the Clark carpet worth $33.8 million?
It is one of very few complete survivors of the seventeenth-century Persian vase-technique group, its condition is exceptional for its age, and its ownership is documented back to the industrialist and senator William A. Clark, whose collection went to the Corcoran Gallery of Art in 1926.
What is the Pearl Carpet of Baroda?
A ceremonial floor covering commissioned around 1865 for the Maharaja of Baroda, worked on a silk and deer-hide ground with roughly 1.5 million natural Basra pearls, about 2,500 diamonds, and rubies, emeralds and sapphires. Sotheby's sold it in Doha in March 2009 for $5.5 million.
Which period do the most expensive rugs come from?
Almost all of them are court weavings of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Safavid Persia, in Kerman, Kashan and Isfahan, and Mughal India. The Pearl Carpet of Baroda, made around 1865, is the exception on the list.
Can you buy the Ardabil Carpet?
No. The larger of the two Ardabil carpets has been in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London since 1893, and the second is in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Neither is for sale, and neither has ever had an auction price.
Do expensive rugs make good investments?
Auction records are not a return. Rugs trade slowly, the spread between buying and selling price is wide, and auction fees fall on both sides, so a handwoven rug is best treated as a durable object you want to own rather than as a financial holding.
Further reading: the Pazyryk rug · the history of Turkish weaving · what a Hereke rug is · how to tell real silk