SUDDEN POPULARITY
The vogue of the Chinese rug in this country is unquestionably due to the artistic sense and discernment of the late Stanford White. In a certain establishment in New York there had grown up an accumulation of old Chinese pieces, some of them very rare and beautiful, which had been “thrown in” with other art objects purchased. They begged for attention at thirty or forty dollars each, until Mr. White placed one or two of them in the hall of the late William C. Whitney’s house. From that moment the demand for them, and consequently their market value, advanced at a prodigious rate.
No matter what anybody may claim, it is doubtful if there has ever been in Europe or America any definite or systematized knowledge of the locality of origin or the period of Chinese rugs. Aside from the small importance usually attached to them as art products by the Chinese themselves, this dearth of specific knowledge has been due to the fact that the rugs were not woven in Eastern China, but in the interior provinces, and, even after a demand arose for them in the West, buyers were well content to await arrivals in the Treaty Ports, rather than court the perils of travel into the Chinese hinterland. It was believed that as soon as the demand became known there would be great influx of desirable fabrics to Peking. There was; but it lasted only for a little space, and today in the Chinese capital a rug of any merit whatsoever commands a price almost prohibitive. This has led to a great volume of manufacture in Peking, both in new designs and in more or less creditable copies of the old. But so violently has this commercial production been promoted that the very multitude of modern Chinese rugs has begun to work injury to the enterprise; although the texture of the new rugs is finer than that in many of the old ones. In fact, Chinese rug weaving as a whole does not show any impressively high measure of technical accomplishment.