4' x 4' Chinese Hereke Rug | Silk | Round | Blue and Black

A round silk rug measuring 4' x 4', hand-knotted in China to a Hereke design. At a glance it reads as a single pale twelve-point star floating on a field so dark it passes for black until the light catches the blue in it, ringed by a wide scrolling border and finished with long ivory fringe all the way round. At 4' x 4' it sits comfortably under a round table, inside a door, or on a wall.

Design

The centre is a twelve-point star medallion, each ray filled with its own small panel of scrolling vine and palmette work, drawn in cream and gold against pale blue. At the very middle sits a tight knotwork rosette in dark plum and black, the sort of interlaced geometry that the Hereke drawing is known for. Around the star the field is not empty: it carries a dense allover arabesque in blue on near-black, visible only when you are close to it. The border is a single wide band of large curling paisley-like cartouches, each one holding a flowerhead, chained together by a continuous gold outline, with narrow floral guard stripes either side and a flat ivory end band of small square rosettes where the fringe begins.

Colour

Two blues do most of the work: a deep peacock teal in the border and a blue so saturated in the field that it sits right against black. Against those, the medallion is a chalky pale blue that lifts clear of the ground, outlined and veined in ivory and a warm tan gold. Lavender appears twice, once in the knotted centre of the medallion and once as a guard stripe running the full circumference, and it is the one colour that keeps the scheme from being purely cool. The fringe and the end band are undyed ivory.

Making

Hand-knotted in China with a silk pile, which is what allows the drawing to stay this fine at this scale and gives the surface its shift in tone as you move around it. Hereke is a Turkish design name rather than a place of origin here, and this rug was knotted in China. It is listed as new and in perfect condition.