6' x 8' Chinese Scenery Rug | Wool and Silk | Pictorial

A 6' x 8' pictorial piece knotted in China in wool and silk, worked as a single picture rather than a repeating pattern. The subject is a meal in a stone courtyard: a group of men seated and standing around a low round table of fruit, a stairway dropping away to a waterside at the right, and pigeons crossing the upper air. The whole scene is held inside a plain olive green band with no secondary border, which is why it reads as a framed painting more than as a floor covering.

The design

The field is one continuous composition. At its centre a round table carries melon halves, dark grapes, peaches, figs and pomegranates on white dishes, with a white-bearded man in a turban reaching toward it and four or five others leaning in around him. Behind them a doorway opens into a dimmer interior where servers carry trays, and a hanging textile with a teal lattice pattern marks the wall. A tall column divides the picture, and beyond it a facade of latticed upper windows, rosette medallions and an arcaded gallery steps back into the distance. On the right a turned wooden balustrade descends past a vase of pink and cream roses to a quay where small figures, a donkey and more birds are drawn at half scale. Doves are scattered through the sky and along the water, several caught in flight with their wings open.

The colour

The palette is quiet and largely earth-based, which makes the mixed colouring easier to live with than a pictorial rug usually is. Stone walls run through sand, buff and warm taupe; the paving and stairway are brown with plum-dark shadows. Against that the clothing supplies the only saturated notes: terracotta turbans and a long brick red coat, dusty blue and pale slate robes, a green-teal turban, ochre and cream sashes. The foliage at the right edge is a soft grey-green, the roses pink shading to ivory, and the olive green outer band pulls the greens of the scene back together at the edge of the rectangular format.

The making

Hand-knotted in China, with a pile of wool and silk; the silk shows most clearly in the sky, the water and the pale architecture, where the light catches and lifts those areas away from the matte wool of the figures. The back, photographed against a twelve inch rule, shows the flat reverse of the picture with its loose weft ends and a narrow white selvedge along the edge. The table records the rug as recent and the condition as perfect.