6' x 17'3" Pakistani Ziegler Runner | Wool | Gold and Ivory

At 6' x 17'3" this is a gallery runner, long enough for a seventeen foot corridor and wide enough to read as a narrow carpet rather than a strip. It was knotted in Pakistan in the Ziegler manner, with a pile of Ghazni wool. The field is a soft olive-gold carrying an open allover pattern, and a wide pale border with a rosette vine runs the whole length on both sides.

The design

The field pattern is drawn loosely and spaced well apart, so the ground shows between the motifs rather than being crowded by them. Down the centre line runs a repeating sequence of lobed cream medallions with small rosette centres, each one set between arched canopy shapes and short barred bands that read almost as architectural elements. Flanking them are serrated palmettes, split leaves, angular birdlike forms and scattered rosettes, mirrored left to right across the width so that the two halves answer each other. The main border carries alternating rosettes and pendant cartouches on a meandering vine, and is held on both sides by narrow guard stripes of small hooked florets. Both ends finish in plain knotted fringe.

The colour

The ground shifts with the light, reading olive where the pile lies away from the viewer and warm honey where it lies towards, and the spec table records it as beige with tan and gold. The drawing sits on it in two registers: solid shapes in cream and ivory, which is also the ground of the border, and outlines in a madder red that runs from deep burgundy in the border rosettes to a lighter brick in the field tendrils. A few motifs are filled in tan or soft salmon, which keeps the red from looking like the only warm note.

The making

The rug is hand-knotted, and like most hand-knotted rugs of this type it is built on cotton, with the warp ends left as plain fringe at both ends. The pile is Ghazni wool, clipped to a medium height that shows in the folded corner photograph and gives the colours their slight change of tone from one direction to the other. The table lists it as new and the condition as perfect, with no wear, repair or staining visible in the photographs. A width of 6' puts it nearer a large carpet than a standard hall runner, so it wants a wide passage or a long room rather than a narrow one.