6' x 11'6" Tapestry Rug | Pictorial Aubusson-Style Garden Scene | Flat Weave Wall Hanging

This piece was woven as a picture first and a floor covering second. Measuring 6' x 11'6", it carries one continuous pastoral scene from end to end: three barefoot women caught mid dance beneath a clipped ivy arbor, a stone figure pouring water from a pedestal fountain at the opposite end, and a foreground thick with tulips, lilies and cornflowers. There is no pile at all. The image is built entirely in flat woven wool with silk highlights, which is why the faces, the folds of the robes and the fine branches of the tree hold their drawing the way paint on canvas would. The scale suits a long wall above a console or a credenza, and the flat surface lies perfectly clean on the floor in a low traffic room such as a study or formal sitting room. It ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The composition is drawn in the Aubusson verdure manner, a garden divided into two halves by a bright opening of sky. On the right, a run of 5 clipped green arches forms a leafy arcade, with a small fluted column and entablature standing just beyond it. In front of that arcade the 3 dancers turn together, arms raised, their robes swinging in mauve, crimson and pale blue, while a gold lyre and a small ewer rest on the ground at their feet, the props of the music they are moving to. On the left, a heavy tree with a copper colored bough leans over a carved figure on a plinth, water falling in a single thread into a shallow basin. Between the two, the eye travels back into a soft distant landscape of hills and thin trees. The whole lower third is a band of flowering plants: orange tulips, pink lilies, blue cornflowers, ferns and reeds drawn plant by plant rather than repeated. Framing it all is an ivory border of rose garlands linked by small gold cartouches, contained on both sides by a narrow rust guard stripe that turns cleanly at all 4 corners.

A Palette of Faded Rose, Verdure Green and Ivory Light

The coloring is deliberately soft, the look of an 18th century panel that has mellowed in a sunlit room. Greens do most of the work and they are layered: deep pine and teal in the ivy arches, mid sage in the tree canopies, a yellow tinged olive in the grasses, and a pale blue green in the far hills. Against that, the sky and the middle distance open into warm ivory and cream, which is what gives the piece its light. The figures bring the warm notes, mauve and lavender on the first dancer, deep crimson and rose on the second, powder blue on the third, all with ochre gold in the drapery shadows. Underfoot the ground is a dusty rose and taupe, streaked in fine horizontal bands that keep the flat weave from reading as one solid block. The border is ivory with cabbage roses in raspberry and shell pink, small cornflower blue buds, and gold scrollwork, closed by that clay rust stripe that also finishes the outer edge. It is a genuinely multi colored piece, yet nothing in it shouts.

Tapestry Weaving in China: Flat Weave Craft on a Large Scale

Made in China by weavers working in the French tapestry tradition, this panel is built with discontinuous wefts on a cotton warp: each color area is woven in separately by hand and packed down over the warp so that the warp disappears completely and only the image remains. That technique is slow, and it is the reason a scene with faces, hands and individual flower stems can be rendered at all. The weave here is tight and even, the outlines are clean rather than stepped, and the surface is smooth enough to show the shading in the robes and the water. China has become one of the most capable sources for this kind of work, and a well made Chinese tapestry of this size is a serious piece of hand weaving rather than a decorative shortcut. If you are weighing how a piece like this sits alongside knotted pile weaving, our guide on what separates a Persian rug from an Oriental rug is a useful place to start. Light weight and no pile also make it easy to hang: a simple sleeve stitched along the top edge is all it needs.