Wagner Garden Carpet – Metropolitan Museum

Through the summer of 2018, The Metropolitan Museum will have the privilege of showing the Wagner Garden Carpet, a 17th-century Persian carpet never before exhibited outside the United Kingdom. While its home institution, the Burrell Collection in Glasgow, undergoes renovation, the carpet will travel to several museums in North America. Composed on the classic plan of the chahar bagh in which canals teeming with fish intersect garden plots alive with trees, flowers, birds, and wild animals, this carpet evokes eternal springtime.

Sheila R. Canby is the Metropolitan Museum of Art's curator of Islamic art and a former curator of Islamic art and antiquities at the British Museum. She is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society.  She has held positions at the Brooklyn Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Fogg Art Museum, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was a visiting lecturer at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London.