11'4" x 18' Aubusson Rug | French Floral Medallion | Beige Field, Green Border | Oversize Flat-Weave

At 136 inches across and a full 18 feet long, this 11'4" x 18' Aubusson is a true palace piece and one of the largest oversize rugs we keep in stock. It is worked in the Aubusson manner, a smooth hand-woven flat surface with no raised pile, so the drawing reads like a painting laid on the floor and the rug sits low enough to slide under the heaviest dining table or sofa without lifting a leg. The field is a warm champagne beige, the wide border a deep pine green, and rose bouquets run through both from the oval center cartouche out to the 4 corner medallions. The wool is full, the greens and pinks have not faded, and the selvedges are straight, all consistent with a piece that spent its life stored rather than walked on. It ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The composition follows the 18th century French court formula exactly. At the center sits a tall ivory oval cartouche ringed in pale blue and gold bands, filled with a bouquet of open roses, wisteria sprays and small daisies, and framed top and bottom by brown scrolling acanthus leaves. Four large flower clusters float on the open field around it, each one tied with a pale ribbon and set on the diagonal so the eye travels corner to corner. The field itself is outlined by a shaped, cusped cartouche line in gold and blue that breaks inward at the middle of each side, a detail you can see clearly in the overhead photographs. The deep green border carries a continuous garland of cabbage roses, peonies and buds twisting through gilt acanthus scrollwork and trailing ribbons, and at each of the 4 corners an ivory oval holds its own small rose spray inside a beaded gold frame. Two pale blue guard stripes and an outer wheat sheaf band finish the edge.

The Beige Field and Its Deep Green Frame

The field is a soft champagne beige, closer to warm cream than to tan, and it holds its tone evenly across the whole 18 feet. Against it the border reads as a dark pine green with a distinct teal cast in raking light, the single strongest color in the rug and the reason the pale center looks as luminous as it does. The flowers are drawn in a full range of rose tones, from a deep raspberry at the heart of each bloom through salmon, shell pink and near white at the outer petals, with sage and olive greens for the foliage and small touches of cornflower blue and lilac scattered through the bouquets. The scrollwork is worked in old gold and honey brown, and pale powder blue runs through the guard stripes and ribbon tails to cool everything down. It is a genuinely quiet palette for a rug this large, and it sits easily with ivory walls, gilded mirrors and dark wood.

Aubusson Weaving and the Quality of This Piece

Aubusson takes its name from the town in central France whose workshops supplied the royal households from the 17th century onward with flat tapestry-woven floor coverings rather than knotted pile. That tradition was carried into the Chinese workshops of the 1900s, where this rug was made by hand in wool on a cotton foundation, and the standard of drawing here is high: the petals shade in three and four tones, the acanthus curls stay fluid across their whole length, and the border garland repeats without the stiffness that gives a poor copy away. As an Oriental rug in the European idiom, it belongs to a category collectors take seriously, and the flat construction gives it a practical advantage at this scale, since 136 by 216 inches of low, dense weave stays put under furniture and never crushes.