3' x 4' Chinese Scenery Rug | Silk | Blue and Burgundy

A hand-knotted silk rug from China, measuring Width: 3' x Length: 4' and built around a single pictorial medallion. The field is a strong mid blue, the main border a deep wine burgundy, and the whole piece is small enough to work as an accent rug or to hang flat on a wall. Long ivory fringes finish both ends of the rectangular format.

The design

The centre holds an oval scene framed in scrolling rust and gold cartouche work: a mountain rising behind a stand of pines, a stream running down to a lake, swans and ducks on the water, and a blossoming branch crossing the sky at the upper left. Around it the blue field carries loose sprays of roses and daisies rather than an all-over lattice, so the scene reads clearly from across a room. Each of the four corners of the burgundy border carries its own small landscape in a pointed cartouche, and no two repeat: a brick bridge with swans and a grazing horse, a deer and a dog before a cottage, a flowering tree above a lake, a cypress and a pink-walled house behind a fence. The border between them runs palmettes and leafy vines, contained by an ivory guard band of gold arabesques and, at one end, a small woven inscription cartouche just above the fringe.

The colour

The field is a saturated blue that shifts between royal and deeper navy as the silk pile catches the light, and the border is a burgundy close to wine. Against those two, the medallion frame and the corner scrollwork are worked in rust and copper, with brown in the hillsides and tree trunks. The lake and the small border blossoms bring in turquoise, and the flowers are picked out in rose pink, ivory and sage green, which keeps the two dark grounds from closing in on each other.

The making

Knotted by hand in silk, pile and foundation both, which is what allows the fine detail in the ducks, the pine needles and the brickwork of the bridge. The back, shown here with a tape measure across it, is close and even, and the fringes are the warps of the rug itself rather than an applied trim. The rug is new and in perfect condition, with the full pile and sheen intact. It sits among the rugs we carry at the small, finely knotted end of the range.