What are the opening hours?

Monday 9:30am - 5pm Tuesday 9:30am - 5pm Thursday 9:30am - 5pm Friday 9:30am - 5pm Saturday 9:30am - 5pm

Legge carpets • textiles, 25 Oakthorpe Road, Oxford (2026)

08/07/2023

Beautiful silk ikat robe

30/01/2020

A great mind has passed away - we will miss you, JT!

It is with great sadness and regret that we have to advise readers of the death on 23 January 2020 of the UK Islamic carpet and textile scholar Dr Jon Thompson, who has been one of the most influential contributors to the study of Islamic carpets since the 1970s.

A Cambridge-educated physician who abandoned medicine in favour of carpets and collateral areas of Islamic art, Thompson was a compelling lecturer at major international conferences and symposia, as well as at a wide variety of rug society meetings, and an admirable teacher of rug and carpet courses at SOAS, the British Museum, Oxford University and through Sotheby’s. Notable for the intellectual clarity of his carefully thought-out presentations, he first came to attention during through the annotated publication by the Crosby Press of an English edition of A.A. Bogolyubov’s seminal 1906 work 'Carpets of Central Asia' (1973) in which Thompson defined the so called ‘S’-group of previously unclassified Salor Turkmen weavings, as well as through important 1970s and early 1980s essays in Lefevre auction catalogues and in David Black and Clive Loveless’s 'Rugs of the Wandering Baluchi' exhibition catalogue (1974).

He was the primary co-author and co-curator (with Louise Mackie) of the 1980 Washington Textile Museum ICOC exhibition and catalogue 'Turkmen', which rapidly became a standard work on the subject, and in 1983, for the London ICOC, he curated and wrote the catalogue for the 'Carpet Magic' exhibition at the Barbican Centre, which, subtitled 'Carpets from the Tents, Cottages and Workshops of Asia', remains one of the best books ever written about the appeal of antique Islamic rugs.

From 2001 to 2007, Thompson held the position of May Beattie Fellow in Carpet Studies at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology and the Khalili Research Centre at Oxford University. While there, he organised the highly successful 2003 international symposium devoted to 'Carpets and Textiles of the Iranian World 1300'. In 2008, he received the Washington Textile Museum’s George Hewitt Myers Award in recognition of his significant contributions to the field of textile arts. Most recently, in June 2019, he was one of the featured lecturers at the National Gallery in London during HALI’s anniversary celebrations, where he gave a lucid and memorable talk on colour perception in eastern rugs. Busy and active until the last, his death leaves much important work unfinished. He will be greatly missed by friends and colleagues.

His publications include 'Silk, Carpets and The Silk Road' (1988), 'The Nomadic Peoples of Iran' with Richard Tapper (2002), 'Silk: Treasures from the Museum of Islamic Art, Qatar and Hunt for the Sun: The Court Arts of Safavid Persia' (2004), 'Milestones in the History of Carpets' (2006) and 'Tibet to Timbuktu: Exotic Rugs and Textiles from New York Collectors' (2008).