A Survey of Northwest Persian Garden Carpets
Starting from the Jaipur Garden carpet (the only surviving example of what was presumably a group of similar carpets woven in Kerman in the late 16th century) Bruce Healy will trace the development of the NW Persian Garden Carpet design as it evolved from the late 17th century to the early 19th century, using both stylistic and structural analyses. He will illustrate how the carpet designs relate both to each other and to actual formal gardens in Persia.
Bruce Healy graduated from Williams College in 1968 and earned his Ph.D. in theoretical physics at The Rockefeller University in 1973. He was a member at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and then the J.W. Gibbs Instructor in Physics at Yale University, publishing a dozen papers in top journals in the field. He left physics in 1980 to write about the art of French pastry, authoring three books with Parisian pastry chef Paul Bugat. In 2007 he began doing scholarly research on classical Persian carpets, specializing in the early carpets of Khorasan and the 18th century chahar bagh carpets of NW Persia. He focuses on using microphotography to analyse and document the structure of the carpets in each group.
In spring 2012 Bruce published an article in Hali on 'The Jaipur Garden Carpet' and lectured at the Hali 200 Symposium in London in 2019 on 'The Portuguese Carpets of Shah Abbas'.
He is also an expert on mid-century modern silver jewellery from Scandinavia and Taxco, and he served on the board of advisors for the 2nd and 3rd editions of Warman’s Jewelry.