7'7" x 9'10" Indian Antique-Design Rug | Wool | Mauve and Beige

A 7'7" x 9'10" rectangular carpet knotted in India with a wool pile, worked after an older carpet drawing. Seen from above it reads as a soft greyish-lilac field carrying rows of pale roundels, set inside a broad band of warm gold that does most of the work of framing it.

Design

The field is laid out as a lattice: twenty-four circular rosette medallions in five columns, each ringed by a thin cream outline and filled with a small arrangement of curling leaves and buds. Between them the ground is not left plain but filled with angular vine tracery, narrow pale leaf forms, little stepped diamonds and scattered four-petal flowers, so the lattice reads as a continuous trellis rather than separate panels. Three borders surround it. The widest is a gold band of interlocking fretwork drawn in pale lavender, a hooked, angular motif repeated end to end. Inside that runs a cream band of linked ovals, each with a sprig of two or three leaves. An outer guard of cream carries small cross-shaped rosettes alternating with pale diamonds, and the selvage finishes in the same mauve as the field.

Colour

The ground is a grey-leaning mauve, closer to dusty lilac in raking light and closer to taupe where the pile lies the other way. Against it the roundels and the wide border sit in a warm beige that deepens to honey gold along the outer band. Olive appears in small quantities, in the leaf tips and some of the border rosettes, and there is a tobacco brown used for outlines and the occasional flower head. Cream and near-white pick out the tracery and keep the two main tones apart. Nothing in the palette is loud; the contrast is carried by value rather than by hue.

Making

Hand-knotted in wool on a cotton-coloured fringe that is left plain at both ends, this is one of the hand-knotted carpets woven in India to an antique pattern. The spec table records it as new and in perfect condition, and the close photographs bear that out: the pile is even, the border lines are straight, and the edges and ends are intact.