10' x 14' India Agra Rug | Antique Mohtasham Design | Fine Dense Weave, Never Used

This is a brand new 10' x 14' Agra rug, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and drawn after an antique Mohtasham pattern, one of the most sought after classical floral schemes in the trade. What sets it apart from the usual room-size floral is the density of the weave and how low the pile has been sheared: the vine work stays legible at arm's length and at floor level, which is exactly what this drawing needs. The wool has a soft, waxy handle with real luster, and the color has been washed down to an aged, sun-mellowed tone rather than left bright. It has never been on a floor, it is free of any wear or repair, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity. At 10 feet by 14 feet it is a true room-size piece, and you can see how it compares with other 10 x 14 hand-knotted rugs in the same format.

Design and Motifs

The field is a continuous lattice of scrolling arabesque vine carrying palmettes, split leaves, 8 petal rosettes and slim cypress-like flowering sprays, all balanced on a strict vertical axis so the pattern mirrors itself top to bottom and left to right. At the center sits a small lobed cross-shaped medallion, no wider than a chair seat, filled with tiny brown and ivory florets and outlined in rust, a restrained anchor rather than a dominant one. Faint corner spandrels are drawn in the same tone as the ground and read almost as a whisper, which is a hallmark of the antique Mohtasham handling this design follows. The main border carries alternating brown cartouche palmettes and curling boteh forms on an ivory-beige ground, flanked on both sides by a wide reciprocal vine stripe and then by narrow guard stripes of repeating 4 petal blossoms. Because the drawing is quiet and evenly distributed, it behaves like one of the best all over floral rugs for a furnished room: sofas and tables can sit anywhere on it without cutting off a single important element.

A Closer Look at the Colors

The ground is a warm wheat beige that shifts between soft ivory and a light camel depending on where the light falls, and the whole palette sits within two or three steps of it. Drawing is outlined in a clear brick rust that reads almost coral where the pile catches light and deepens to oxblood inside the flower heads, as in the close-up of the field. Filling the larger palmettes and the border cartouches is a dusty coffee brown with a taupe undertone, the darkest note in the rug and still nowhere near black. Between them sit the quieter accents: a muted sage green in the small rosettes, a pale peach in the petal tips, and an off-white ivory used for highlights and for the outer selvage area. There is no navy, no charcoal and no hot red anywhere, so the rug stays luminous in a room with cream walls, oak or walnut floors, and brass or bronze metal. Light abrash, the natural tonal drift of hand-dyed wool, runs across the field and keeps a surface this large from reading flat.

Agra Origin and Weaving Quality

Agra, in northern India, has been a weaving center since the Mughal court workshops, and it is the name the trade still uses for finely drawn classical florals woven in that tradition. Today India produces most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work, and this piece shows why: the knot count is high enough to carry curved vine without the steps and jogs you see in coarser goods, the cotton warp and weft are tightly beaten so the rug lies dead flat, and the selvages and fringe are finished by hand, as the corner and back photographs show. The wool is hand-spun and hand-dyed, then the finished rug is hand-washed and low-sheared, which is what gives the pile its sheen and the design its crispness. If you are weighing this against other weaving groups, our guide on what actually separates an Oriental rug from the rest is worth reading before you decide.