12' x 18' Jaipur Rug | French Aubusson Floral Design | Wool and Silk Pile, Never Used

This is a big, serious room piece: 216 square feet of hand-knotted wool and silk woven in the workshops of Jaipur, India, in a French Aubusson drawing of rose bouquets, ribbons and scrolling acanthus on a deep red ground. It has never been on a floor, and the pile still has the full height and sheen you can see in the close-up photographs. At 12 x 18 oversize rugs like this one fill a formal living room, a long dining room or a great room wall to wall, and pieces in this size are simply not woven in quantity. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is hand-knotted and describing the size, materials and origin exactly as listed above.

Design and Motifs

The field is a French Aubusson composition, symmetrical on both axes and built around a round central bouquet of roses, poppies and small daisies wrapped in trailing ribbon. Above and below that center sit two fluted urns spilling flowers, each anchoring a cascade of garlands that reach into the 4 corners. Between them the ground is filled with loose sprays, rosebuds, tulips and leafy sprigs, so the eye never lands on an empty patch of red. Large pale acanthus scrolls curl inward from each side, and heavy corner cartouches in cream and soft brown frame the field at the ends. The main border repeats the same vocabulary at a slower rhythm: big ivory scrolls, rosettes and open flower heads on red, held between a narrow sky blue guard stripe of salmon palmettes and a fine floral vine band on the outer edge. The drawing is curvilinear throughout, with no straight geometric line anywhere in the rug, which is exactly what this style demands.

A Deep Wine Red Field with Rose Pink, Sage and Sky Blue

The ground is a deep wine red, a shade with more burgundy in it than orange, and it reads darker in the open areas of the border than it does under the flowers. Against it the palette is deliberately soft: rose pink and salmon for the roses, with cream and pale peach centers and fine black outlining that gives each blossom its shape, sage and emerald green for the leaves, and two distinct blues, a clear sky blue in the ribbons and guard stripe and a deeper slate blue in the smaller blossoms. Touches of yellow and buttercream appear in scattered flower heads, and the large scrolls are worked in ivory, mushroom and soft brown. The silk is used where it earns its keep, in the highlights of the petals and the ribbon edges, so those areas catch the light and shift tone as you walk around the rug. If you are shopping the red and burgundy rugs range, this is a warm red rather than a bright one, and it sits well with dark wood and antique brass.

Woven in Jaipur, India

Jaipur, in Rajasthan, is one of the great weaving centers of the modern hand-knotted trade, and India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made. We say that with confidence: the knot count here is fine enough to carry the curved line and the tight petal detail the Aubusson style needs, the cotton foundation is straight and even, and the back shown in the photographs is regular from selvedge to selvedge with no pulled rows. A loom this wide takes a team of weavers working in step for a long stretch of time, and any drift in tension over 18 feet would show immediately in a symmetrical design. If you are weighing this against other origins, our guide on what separates an Oriental rug from other hand-knotted traditions explains where a Jaipur weave like this one sits.