5' x 8' Chinese Aubusson Rug | Bamboo Silk | Navy and Ivory

A 5' x 8' rug knotted in China with a bamboo silk pile. The field reads almost black at a glance, a navy so deep that the tan scrollwork and the pale roses sitting on it look lit from behind. At the centre is an ivory cartouche holding a bouquet, and the whole thing is framed by a wide ivory border of flowers and a plain navy outer band finished with white fringe at both ends.

Design

The pattern is Aubusson, the French flat-woven style of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, here translated into a knotted pile. The ivory medallion is a lobed cartouche outlined by a narrow fret band, filled with roses, small blue blossoms and green foliage, and anchored top and bottom by leafy pendants. Two smaller round cartouches face each other across the middle of the field, each one carrying a single flower head. Around them the rectangular field is covered in large curling acanthus leaves arranged symmetrically on either side of the long axis, with sprays of roses and carnations dropped between the scrolls. A thin dark guard stripe of small serrated points separates the field from the main ivory border, which runs with rose and carnation heads on a leafy vine and breaks at the centre of each side for a shield-shaped cartouche. Four corner rosettes sit in the navy outer band.

Colour

The ground is a saturated navy blue, close to indigo where the pile lies flat and nearly black where it lies the other way. Against it the acanthus work runs from pale wheat through gold to a caramel brown, with occasional cool grey-green highlights along the scroll edges. The flowers are rose pink, coral and a darker madder red, the leaves move between pine and sage, and a few small cornflower blues are scattered through the field and the border. The ivory of the medallion and the border is warm rather than white, which keeps the pink and coral tones from looking stark.

The making

This is a hand-knotted rug from China, with a pile of bamboo silk. The material accounts for the sheen in the photographs: the gold scrollwork changes value noticeably depending on which way the light crosses it, and the folded corner shots show how the pile catches light along a crease. The weave is fine enough to carry the small rose buds and the fret band around the medallion cleanly. The table records the age as recent and the condition as perfect, placing it with the new rugs rather than the older stock.