4' x 6' Silk Pictorial Rug | Navy Blue Garden Scene with Cherubs | Brand New

This 4' x 6' rug is a picture first and a floor covering second. The whole surface is knotted in silk, and the scene it carries is a night garden: a woman in a burgundy robe reaching up into a flowering tree, a young flute player seated at a stone plinth with a spotted skin across his knees, and 3 cherubs tumbling overhead with a tambourine and an armful of blossoms. Because the pile is silk, the picture changes as you move. Skin tones go from pale rose to warm amber, the burgundy drapery flashes almost black, and the navy ground picks up a violet shine. The weave is fine enough to draw a face, an eyelid and the strings of an instrument in recognizable detail, which is only possible at a very high knot count. The piece is brand new, never used, in perfect condition, and ships with a certificate of authenticity. At the standard 4x6 rug size it works equally well laid in a reading corner or mounted and hung as art.

Design and Motifs

The inner field is a classical figural composition set into a dense flowering thicket. A ribbed burgundy urn stands at the right, wrapped in grapevine with heavy clusters of pale and rose colored grapes, and a bird perched in the branches above it. At the base of the field, laid out as though the musicians had just set them down, are a lyre, a long flute, a tambourine and a red and gold stringed instrument, all drawn in fine outline. The main border is the second picture: a navy band populated by elephants, deer, gazelles, monkeys, long tailed birds and small nude figures riding among flowering shrubs, interrupted at the center of each side and at the 4 corners by ivory and navy roundels. One roundel holds a maiden in pale blue playing a lute, another a seated figure among vines, and each corner cartouche is flanked by a pair of drawn gold lions. Slim ivory guard stripes carrying rosettes, palmettes and turquoise buds separate the border from the field, and a narrow outer band with a small woven cartouche runs just inside the fringe.

The Color Palette: Midnight Navy, Burgundy and Blush Silk

Navy blue does almost all of the structural work here. The field ground is a deep midnight navy that reads nearly black in the shaded photographs and opens to a clear cobalt where the light rakes across the pile, which is exactly what silk does and what a wool rug cannot do. Against that ground the palette is warm: burgundy and true red in the robe, the urn and the rosette centers, blush pink and pale flesh tones across the figures and the tumbling cherubs, and soft gold running through the lions, the vine stems and the outer guard band. Olive and sage green carry the foliage, with cooler mint and turquoise touches in the small blossoms and in the maiden's gown. Ivory is the relief color, used for the guard stripes, the roundel frames and the grazing animals in the border, and it keeps the two heavy blues from closing in on each other. The fringe finishes in a silvery ivory that picks up the same sheen as the pile. Nothing in the palette is muddy; every shade is separated by an outline, which is what keeps a scene this crowded legible from across a room.

Origin and Weaving Quality: Hand-Knotted Silk from China

This rug was hand-knotted in China, in the workshop tradition that has specialized in fine silk pictorial weaving for decades and is now responsible for much of the best figural silk work on the market. The standard for judging any Oriental rug of this type is drawing, and drawing at this level of detail is a knot count problem before it is an artistic one. A face measures only a few inches across on a rug 48" wide, so the eyes, lips, hair and the strings of the lute are each built from a handful of knots, and a single misplaced row would distort the expression. The reverse, visible in the back photograph, shows a tight even grid with no loose or skipped areas, the knot heads small and regular right through the curved outlines of the figures. Silk takes a smaller knot than wool and holds a sharper edge, which is why this composition was woven in silk rather than translated into a coarser material. The selvages are clean, the ends are finished with a woven guard band above a full silk fringe, and the piece has never been on a floor.