4' x 6' Turkish Hereke Rug | Silk | Ivory and Grey

A 4' x 6' rectangular rug knotted in Turkey with a pile of silk. The field is a pale, softly mottled grey carrying a single lobed cream medallion, and the wide ivory border is filled with animals: stags, leopards, birds and long-legged gazelles set among flowering vines. Seen from an angle the silk shifts between chalky grey and warm straw, which is why the same field reads paler in some photographs than in others.

Design

The medallion at the centre is a scalloped cartouche on a cream ground, outlined in madder red and filled with small rosettes, blue buds and cypress forms, with pendant finials reaching up and down the long axis. Around it the field is scattered rather than crowded: pairs of confronted leopards drawn in cream with red outlines, single cats striding across open ground, birds, small eight-pointed stars and thin orange flower stems. The corner spandrels are worked in the same ivory as the medallion and carry deer, birds and blossoming branches. The main border repeats a cadence of two golden stags or gazelles lowering their heads towards a dark indigo vase or tulip form, with narrow floral meander guard stripes on either side and a fine outer vine at the edge.

Colour

The field sits in the grey range, closer to pewter in the centre and lightening towards the ends, and the photographs of the reverse show that grey with a distinct blue cast. Against it the drawing is carried in ivory and beige, warm gold and pumpkin orange, with brick red and deeper brown in the medallion outlines and the flower heads. Small touches of soft blue and green appear inside the rosettes. Outlines and the outer vine are drawn in a near black that holds the whole pale scheme together and keeps the animals legible against the light ground.

Making

The rug is hand-knotted with a silk pile in the Hereke manner, named for the weaving town on the Sea of Marmara, and the fineness shows in the drawing: a leopard's face, a stag's antler and the veining of a single leaf are all resolved in a few knots. The folded corner photograph shows an even, tightly packed back with the pattern reading clearly from the reverse. The table dates the rug to the 1980's and gives its condition as excellent, and the silk still carries the sheen that makes the field change tone as it is walked around.