7'9" x 9'6" Oriental Rug | Paradise Birds and Animals Design on Black | Hand-Knotted Wool

This is a Paradise design worked the way it was meant to be worked: a jet black ground crowded with flowering stems, and hidden among them birds, gazelles and running hounds that you only start to count once the rug is on the floor. It is hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation, never used, and the pile still stands full and springy, with the scissor-cut clarity you can see in the close photographs. At 7'9" x 9'6" it sits squarely in the most useful room size there is, which makes it a natural candidate among 8 x 10 area rugs for a dining table or a full seating group. As with every piece we import directly, it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a genuine hand-knotted Oriental rug.

Design and Motifs

The field is drawn as a true all-over pattern with no medallion, mirrored along both axes so the composition reads the same from either end of the room. Slender brown vines climb the ground and open into palmettes, 8 petal rosettes, tulips and half-open buds, while leaping gazelles, long-tailed birds, peacocks and slim hounds thread between them. Counting the animals is half the pleasure of the rug; the detail shots show pairs facing one another across a flower head, and single stags set in the outer quarters of the field. The main border carries a scrolling vine with large rosettes and cloud-like leaf forms, flanked by narrow ivory guard stripes of small linked flowerets and a fine sawtooth minor stripe. The outermost band returns to black, so the design closes on the same note it opens with, and the corners resolve cleanly rather than being cut off mid-motif.

Black Ground, Salmon Pink Border and the Palette Between

The ground is a deep, even black with no abrash, which is a difficult color to hold across 93" of width and the reason every pale motif on it reads so sharply. Against it the weaver has put soft blush pink, shell peach, ivory and cream, with muted sea green and teal in the leaves and bird bodies, occasional raspberry and old rose in the flower centers, and warm cinnamon brown in the vine work and the animals. The main border shifts the temperature entirely, a wide salmon pink that lifts the whole piece and keeps the black from going heavy, drawn over with pale grey-blue arabesques and dark outlines. Ivory guard stripes separate the two zones and the cotton fringe at each end is a clean natural ivory. In practice this is a black and pink rug with green and ivory doing the quiet work in between, and it settles easily against warm woods, brass, cream upholstery and dark painted walls.

Made in India: Weaving Town and Quality

India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, and this rug is a fair example of why. It is knotted by hand on a cotton warp and weft, with a wool pile clipped low enough to hold the fine outlines of the birds and vine tips without blurring them, which is what a figural design of this density demands. The back shown in the photographs is tight and regular, the knot rows are straight, and the selvedges and fringe are finished by hand rather than machine-serged. Nothing here pretends to be older or from somewhere else than it is: it is a new piece, never walked on, woven in a workshop tradition that takes classical drawing seriously and executes it at a knot count high enough to carry it. For a buyer who wants the look of a classical animal and garden design without the price of an antique, that is the whole argument.