8'10" x 11'9" Chinese Aubusson Needlepoint Rug | Rose Medallion & Burgundy Border | Flat Weave

This is a flat-woven needlepoint Aubusson measuring 8'10" x 11'9", a room-size piece that reads as a true 9x12 on the floor yet lies almost perfectly flush, with no pile height to fight furniture legs or door clearance. The whole composition is drawn in the French salon manner: an ivory field, a rose-toned reserve at the centre holding an oval bouquet, scrolling acanthus in soft gold, and a deep cranberry band framing it all. Because it is woven rather than knotted and pile-clipped, the surface has the smooth, painterly quality of a tapestry, and the drawing stays crisp right down to individual rosebuds and berry clusters. It is a genuine hand-woven Oriental rug, recent in age and in perfect condition, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity. Buyers working to a standard room plan can also browse our other 9 x 12 rugs for comparison.

Design and Motifs

The layout follows the classic Aubusson formula. At the centre sits an oval cartouche outlined in gold, filled with a naturalistic bouquet of open roses, buds and leaves drawn in the round rather than stylised. That oval floats inside a larger shaped reserve, flanked left and right by two pointed palmette panels and closed top and bottom by curling acanthus scrolls that meet in a shield motif. Beyond the reserve, the ivory field carries long sprays of vine leaves, berry clusters and half-open blossoms that spread symmetrically toward each of the 4 corners. The wide guard band is plain cranberry, broken only by small ribbon flourishes, which gives the eye somewhere to rest before the outer border begins. That outer border is the most ornamental part of the rug: 4 large corner roundels each hold a wreath of pink roses inside a gilt cornucopia scroll, while the mid-border cartouches on all 4 sides carry a crimson shield with feathered leaf scrolls running out either side. A narrow diamond lattice stripe in rose and gold finishes the edge, and a small quatrefoil rosette marks the outermost corner.

A Burgundy, Ivory and Green Palette

Three colors carry the rug. The framing bands are burgundy, deep and slightly cool, closer to cranberry than to brick, and they are what give the piece its weight; shoppers who work in that family will find comparable tones across our red and burgundy rugs. Against that, the field and the outer border ground are ivory, warm rather than stark, with a faint oatmeal cast where the weave catches the light. The third note is green: sage and olive through the vine leaves, deepened with a bottle green shadow line along the leaf edges so the foliage reads three-dimensional. Between those three sit the transitional tones that make an Aubusson look like a painting rather than a graphic, chiefly a soft dusty rose across the central reserve, blush pink in the rose petals, and a gold-tan used for every scroll and cartouche outline. Small touches of pale grey-blue appear in the border leaves and in the ivory teardrop panels beside the medallion. Overall the effect is muted and powdery rather than saturated, which is exactly the point of the style.

Origin and Weaving Quality

The Aubusson design comes from the French workshops of the 17th and 18th centuries, where flat tapestry weaving was used to make floor pieces for salons and state rooms. This rug is a faithful hand-woven interpretation made in China, where workshops have specialised in needlepoint and tapestry-weave production for decades and now produce most of the good work in this category. The construction is a tightly beaten flat weave on a cotton foundation with wool weft, which is why the surface is smooth, reversible in appearance and stable enough to hold curved drawing without the outlines stepping. You can see the discipline of the weave in the close-up images: the curve of a rose petal, the taper of an acanthus scroll and the shading inside a single leaf all resolve cleanly, which only happens when the weaver is changing color across very small counts. The back tag records it as rug number 6315 at 8.10 x 11.9, and the selvedges and ends are tidy and intact with no repair.