8'10" x 11'10" Indian Agra Rug | Soltanabad All Over Floral Design | Coral, Gold & Sage, Brand New

This is a brand new, never used hand-knotted wool rug woven in India in the Soltanabad manner, with a coral red field carried edge to edge by big open palmettes and a wide honey gold border. At 8'10" x 11'10" it sits squarely in the 9x12 rug range that most living rooms and dining rooms are planned around, long enough to run a sofa and two chairs fully on the rug or to seat a 10 person table with the chairs still on wool when pulled back. The pile is thick and springy, the wool has a dry matte luster rather than a shine, and the drawing is deliberately large scale and relaxed instead of fussy. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording its size, materials, weave and origin.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field is an all over floral design built from oversized sunburst palmettes, lotus blossoms and fan shaped flower heads, strung together by a loose vine scroll with long serrated leaves between them. The repeat is drawn on a large grid, roughly 4 palmettes across the width, which is what gives the rug its calm, uncrowded look from a standing position. Small 8 petal rosettes and tiny buds fill the gaps so the ground never reads empty. The main border runs a chain of linked cartouches and curling split leaves on a lighter ground, broken at each side and end by a single larger medallion shaped cartouche, and it is framed by narrow sage guard stripes carrying a running vine and small blossoms. The corners resolve cleanly, and the field pattern runs straight into the border in the classic village manner rather than being neatly closed off, which is exactly how the original Soltanabad weavings were drawn.

A Coral Field Framed in Gold and Sage

The ground is a soft coral red, closer to raspberry than to fire engine red, and it moves in gentle horizontal bands of abrash from a deeper berry tone at one end to a lighter rose cast at the other. Against it the flowers are worked in wheat gold, pale honey, buff ivory and a dusty sage green, with the larger palmettes shaded from cream at the center out to gold at the tips so they look lit from within. Scattered accents of plum, slate blue and soft pink sit inside the flower heads and keep the palette from going flat. The wide outer border is a warm sandy gold that reads nearly ivory under daylight, carrying terracotta and olive drawing, while the sage green guard stripes and the solid coral selvage pull the border back to the field. Taken together the rug sits comfortably with warm woods, brass, cream upholstery and almost any red or green already in the room.

Woven in India in the Agra Tradition

India is where most of the world's good contemporary hand-knotted work is now made, and the weaving towns around Agra are the reason why: generations of loom experience, hand-spun wool with real lanolin left in it, and workshops willing to weave a large piece slowly on a cotton foundation. This rug is a genuine Oriental rug, knotted by hand one knot at a time, not tufted or machine made. The back photograph shows an even, regular knot grid with the pattern legible from behind, straight sides, a tight coral wrapped selvage and hand-tied cotton fringe at both ends. The knot count is the moderate density proper to this large scale drawing, which is what allows the generous pile height and the heavy, floor-hugging handle of the finished rug. It is new, has never been on a floor, and is dense enough to take a busy household for decades.