ANTIQUE CARPETS
Carpet Storehouse of the Russian Museum of Ethnography ( St . Petersburg )
Elena Kubel ,
Researcher , Department of Ethnography of the Peoples of the Caucasus , Central Asia and Kazakhstan , Russian Museum of Ethnography , St . Petersburg .
The Department of Ethnography of the Russian Museum of Emperor Alexander III ( now the Russian Museum of Ethnography ) was founded in 1902 . Prominent Russian ethnographers and orientalists took part in its creation . Throughout its history , the museum has been studying the ethnic culture of the peoples of Eurasia , in accordance with the main task , as “ to present a picture of the ethnographic extension of our fatherland , a picture of the peoples living in Russia and in its neighbourhood ”.
Carpet Storehouse of RME is a specialized storage for large carpets and rugs . Small carpets are kept in the soft reserve funds of the regional departments . Today , the Carpet Storehouse has more than 1,300 monuments . Periods are extremely wide : from the XVIII to the first decade of the XXI century . Carpet collections were formed both on the basis of numerous expeditions of scientists and collectors working on the instructions of the museum and having the status of its correspondent , and were bought with the help of the Purchasing Commission . In 1948 , the carpet collection was enriched with monuments from the Museum of the Peoples of the USSR , which had been disbanded in Moscow . In the 1960-1980s , thanks to the Art Fund of the USSR , the carpet collection of the modern period was actively formed .
Smooth Carpet . European part of Russia . Russians . XIX century . RME , col . 222-6
The collections of the peoples of Eastern Europe include carpet monuments of Russian , Belarusian , Ukrainian , Bulgarian , Polish , Romanian and Moldavian production of both pile and lint-free weaving . The museum collection includes a variety of carpet items from the Voronezh , Kursk , Orel , Ryazan and Tula provinces of the Russian Empire .
One of the first exhibits was a carpet dating from the XIX century ( RME , col . 222-6 ). It appeared in
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