10'2" x 14' Chinese Aubusson Rug | French Savonnerie Floral Medallion | Fine Wool, Crown Cartouches

This is a full room-size hand-knotted piece, 10'2" x 14' of fine wool pile on a cotton foundation, drawn in the French Aubusson manner but knotted rather than flat-woven, which gives the design real depth and a soft, slightly sculpted surface underfoot. The burgundy field is unusually even in tone, the drawing is symmetrical corner to corner, and the pile is clipped low enough that the rose heads, acanthus leaves and the four crown cartouches read as clean shapes instead of blurred blocks of color. Condition is perfect, with full pile, straight sides and bright cotton fringe at both ends, as shown against the ruler in the last photograph. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is 100% hand-knotted. If you are shopping the large hand-knotted rugs category for a formal living room or a long dining room, this is the traditional end of that range, and it is worth knowing how a piece like this differs from a village weaving before you buy: see Persian rugs vs Oriental rugs for the distinction.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a large circular medallion built from concentric rings: an inner bouquet of full-blown roses, then a ring of ribbon scrollwork, then alternating bands of small blossoms and gold strapwork, so the medallion reads almost like a carved plaster ceiling rose. Around it the field fills with 12 rosette wheels wrapped in curling acanthus leaves, the classic Aubusson vocabulary, each wheel anchoring a corner or a side of the composition and spinning outward into feathered leaf tips. Fine flowering vines thread between them, rising from the center line toward the ends so the field never goes empty. At the midpoint of each of the 4 sides sits a small cartouche holding a woven crown, framed by a wreath of green foliage and pink blossoms, the detail shown close up in the fifth photograph. The main border is a narrow burgundy band of stylized leaf tips, flanked on the outside by an ivory guard of paired rosettes and palmettes and on the inside by a thin twisted-rope stripe, a restrained frame that lets the field carry the design.

A Burgundy Field Lit with Gold, Green and Brown

The ground is a deep wine burgundy, closer to claret than to tomato red, and it stays consistent across all 14 feet of length, which is the hardest thing to hold in a large single-color field. Against it the palette is warm and low contrast: old gold in the medallion strapwork and the crowns, soft camel and ecru in the acanthus leaves, and a muted sage to olive green in the foliage that keeps the flowers from going sweet. The roses themselves are blush pink shading to dusty rose, with a few in cream, and there are brown and caramel tones in the leaf shadows that give the scrollwork its three-dimensional look. Small touches of teal appear in the leaf tips near the crown cartouches. The outer guard border is ivory, which lifts the whole rug off a dark wood floor, as the parquet photographs show. In lamplight the wool takes on a satin sheen and the gold reads brighter; in daylight the burgundy dominates and the design settles into a quieter, more formal register.

Woven in China in the French Aubusson Tradition

Aubusson and Savonnerie are French court designs, originally flat-woven tapestry and knotted pile made for palace floors in the 17th and 18th centuries, and Chinese workshops have been reproducing that repertoire by hand for decades with real skill. This piece is hand-knotted, not tufted and not machine made: the ruler photograph shows the knot rows on the face, the woven selvage and the cotton warps running out into fringe at both ends, all of which a tufted rug simply does not have. The wool is fine and tightly spun, clipped to a medium-low pile so the curved lines of the scrollwork stay crisp, and the weave is dense enough to take heavy traffic in a formal room for decades. As a piece of workshop production this sits in the better tier of hand-knotted Oriental rugs in the European floral idiom, bought for the drawing and the color rather than for a tribal or village pedigree, and it behaves accordingly: it wears well, cleans well, and lies flat.