6' x 9' Black Aubusson Rug | Ivory Floral Urn Panels | Fine Chinese Weave

This is a handmade Aubusson design rug woven in China in a true 6' x 9' room size, and it reads as a piece of European decorative furniture rather than a floor covering. The ground is a solid, inky black, and across it the weavers have set rows of ivory and champagne urns, each one holding a loose bouquet of roses, with slender leafy vines rising between them to divide the field into panels. The drawing is soft and painterly, the tonal shading inside every petal and every urn is done by hand, and the surface is low, even and tightly compacted, which is why a rug like this sits flat under furniture and shows almost no footprint. The finish is clean, the sides and ends are intact, and the condition is excellent. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording its size, materials, design and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field is built as a repeating panel layout rather than around a central medallion, which is exactly why it works so well in a 6 by 9 footprint where a medallion would be hidden by a sofa or a table. Each panel is framed by a shallow ivory arch and anchored by a tall fluted urn, drawn with scrolled handles and shaded from cream through camel so the vessel appears to turn in the light. Out of each urn spills a bouquet of full cabbage roses, small buds and acanthus leaves, and between the panels long stems of serrated leaves climb vertically to carry the eye down the length of the rug. Toward the upper end of the field the motifs compress into tighter leaf and rosette bands, giving the composition a sense of perspective. A narrow scrolling vine band runs around the field and is finished with a plain black outer edge and a thin camel stripe, a restrained border that keeps all the attention on the bouquets. Collectors of 6x9 floral Oriental rugs will recognise the vocabulary immediately: this is 18th century French tapestry drawing, reproduced by hand on a loom.

A Deep Black Ground With Ivory, Camel and Rose

Black is the dominant color and it is a genuine, saturated black with no brown cast, which is unusual and is what makes the palette above it look like porcelain. The urns and the arches are worked in ivory and warm cream, stepping out through oatmeal, honey and camel tan into a soft brown where the shadows fall. The roses are the only strong accent: dusty rose pink, blush and a faint salmon in the open blooms, with small cream and white buds scattered around them. The foliage is a muted sage and olive green with pale celadon highlights, cool enough to stop the beiges from turning yellow. The outer edge repeats the black ground with a single thin camel line, so the rug frames itself. Against dark wood, parquet or a walnut floor, as shown in the photographs, the black field disappears and the bouquets appear to float. Against a pale floor the effect reverses and the rug becomes a graphic black panel. If you are shopping other black and ivory rugs, note how much warmth the camel and rose tones add here compared with a straight black and white scheme.

Aubusson Design, Woven in China

Aubusson takes its name from the town in central France whose workshops supplied tapestries and floor pieces to the French court from the 17th century onward, and the style is defined by its shaded botanical drawing, its architectural framing and its flat, close surface. Chinese weaving workshops took up the tradition in the modern era and became the principal source for well made Aubusson design rugs, working from painted cartoons with hand-spun wool on a cotton foundation and matching dozens of closely related tones to get the shading inside a single rose petal right. The quality marker to look for is not a high knot count but control of the drawing: the arches should meet cleanly, the urns should be symmetrical panel to panel, and the color transitions should be gradual rather than stepped. This piece holds all three. It is a decorator's rug in the best sense, formal enough for a dining room or a front parlor and flat enough to live under a table, and it sits in the same bracket as our other 6x9 Oriental rugs. If you are weighing it against a knotted pile piece, our guide to Persian rugs versus Oriental rugs explains where each tradition fits.