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"Tapestries of all periods may be out of fashion, but when it comes to carpets, serious collectors will pay stratospheric sums to acquire a particularly choice Oriental. Consider the world-record $33.77 million that an anonymous bidder paid at Sotheby's in June for a 17th-century Persian rarity deaccessioned by Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art and once owned by Gilded Age mining tycoon William A. Clark.\n\nBidders who missed out on that approximately eight-foot-by-six-foot weaving have another chance to land an even larger and arguably more spectacular floor covering on October 8. That's the day that, on behalf of an anonymous owner, Christie's in London offers an antique Moghul carpet that once graced two of America's most opulent residences\u20141 West 57th Street in New York City and the Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island. Both were commissioned by Cornelius Vanderbilt II (1843\u201399), the handsome, exceedingly pious, and notably unsmiling chairman and president of the New York Central Railroad (and great-grandfather of news anchor Anderson Cooper).\n\nPinterestFacebookMade in northern India in the 17th or 18th century, the Vanderbilt star-lattice carpet is expected to bring $3.2 million when it's auctioned on October 8 at Christie's in London. Photo: \u00A9 Christie's Images Ltd. 2013\n\nMeasuring 12.9 feet by 13.6 feet and made in the late 17th or early 18th century in northern India\u2014Leon Rosenstein, author of Antiques: The History of an Idea, posits the city of Srinagar as its origin\u2014the pashmina-wool carpet features an intense scarlet field filled by a golden latticework design made up of interlocking 12-point stars. Those, in turn, enclose symmetrical arrangements of stylized flowers of yellow, pink, white, and blue, some resembling lotus blossoms, others jasmine. Around all this races a broad pine-green border containing rows of shapely medallions and even more colorful blooms.\n\nChristie's expects it to bring as much as $3.2 million\u2014a startlingly conservative estimate given its sale history. In 1989 the carpet was sold at a German auction house for $718,700, then a world record for any carpet. It changed hands again in 1995, at Christie's, for $992,500, then a world record for any Oriental carpet. [UPDATE: The Vanderbilt carpet sold on October 8 for $6.1 million.]\n\nAnother reason to anticipate a third-time-lucky result is the Vanderbilt treasure's rarity. It is one of only 12 known Millefleur (French for \"thousand flower\") rugs from its period, one so superb that scholars have called it \"a masterpiece\" and \"the most sublime of all decorative carpets.\" That being said, the condition report notes \"localized light wear and touches of repiling, a few small repairs, overall very good condition\"\u2014not bad for a carpet crafted some 300 years ago.\n\nPinterestFacebookThe Vanderbilt mansion in New York City shown shortly before it was demolished in the 1920s to make way for the Bergdorf Goodman department store. The ch\u00E2teau-style house, built in the 1880s by architect George B. Post, stands at the center of the photograph, to the left of the Plaza hotel.\n\nHow it ended up in Vanderbilt's possession is unknown. One source states that the millionaire acquired the carpet on a trip to Venice in 1870, when he was in his late 20s. Another source states 1878, a more likely date, according to Paul F. Miller, curator of the Preservation Society of Newport County, which oversees the Breakers, given that the Vanderbilts were then working on one of Manhattan's Gilded Age wonders: a French Renaissance ch\u00E2teau by architect George B. Post, just a few steps from the Plaza hotel. A period photograph shows the carpet hanging above a divan in the Hispano-Moresque\u2013style smoking room. (The building was demolished in 1927 to make way for Bergdorf Goodman.)\n\n After Vanderbilt's death in 1899, the carpet was shipped to the Breakers and rolled out across the floor of his Louis XIV\u2013inspired bedroom. Its kaleidoscope presence gave a fashionable jolt to the bold but staid decor that society decorator Ogden Codman Jr. had installed years before: coral-red curtains, ruby wall-to-wall carpeting, and robber baron\u2013style wood furniture. The carpet remained in place until 1977, when the Vanderbilts' descendants sold the heirloom. And now the stage is set for, perhaps, a new owner and a new auction record.\n\nMore on archdigest.com:\n\n Step inside Lee Radziwill's opulent London drawing room, decorated by Renzo Mongiardino\n\n Check out more posts by Mitchell Owens, AD's The Aesthete"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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