8'4" x 11'7" Chinese Art Deco Rug | Green Field with Peach Rose Garland | 1940s-50s Vintage

This is a room size Chinese Art Deco rug from the 1940s to 1950s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and measuring 8'4" x 11'7". The drawing is pure Deco: one large oval panel of soft green holding an almost empty field, ringed by a garland of coral and pink blossoms, and set into a wide peach ground with scrolling leafwork and flower baskets at the 4 corners. The wool has the thick, silky, high sheen clip these workshops were known for, and decades of settling have given the surface a gentle luster you can see in the close-up photographs. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity, and this one arrives with full pile and no restoration.

Design and Motifs

The composition is built on one bold oval rather than the crowded repeats of older weaving traditions, which is exactly what makes Art Deco drawing feel modern eighty years on. A wreath of full open peonies and smaller five petal blossoms runs around the inner edge of the oval, backed by dark green and olive leaves, leaving the center of the field completely open. Outside the oval, the wide ground carries low contrast tone on tone scrollwork, ribbon banding and sprays of berried foliage, with a tall flower basket rising at the center of each end and stylized bird forms tucked into the corner scrolls. The outer border returns to color with a continuous vine of pink and coral blossoms on green, closed at each corner by a single large rose. Because so much of the field is left quiet, the rug reads as one clear shape from across a room and does not fight with furniture or artwork.

A Green Field with Peach, Coral and Rose

The dominant color is a deep sea green, closer to jade than to grass, and it moves between a cooler celadon and a dark bottle tone as the nap turns. The oval field is slightly deeper in tone than the outer border, so the two greens frame each other instead of blending. Against them sits the wide ground in peach and soft caramel, with the scrollwork picked out only a shade or two lighter than its background. The flowers supply the accent: coral and terracotta peonies in the inner garland, paler blush and salmon blossoms in the outer vine, each with a small deep burgundy or crimson center, all set off by leaves that run from pale sage to almost black green. Beige and ivory appear in the fine outlines and in the guard stripe. It is a green rug first and a pink rug second, and the combination is unusually easy to live with next to cream upholstery, pale oak flooring and brass. Buyers searching green area rugs rarely find this depth of color in a genuine period piece.

Chinese Art Deco Weaving and Quality

Art Deco weaving in China grew out of the Tianjin and Peking workshops of the early twentieth century, where designers deliberately broke with classical repeats and drew for Western rooms: open grounds, oversized single motifs, pastel grounds and a thick clipped pile carved slightly around the outlines. This 8'4" x 11'7" example shows all of it. The wool is heavy and lofty, the knotting is even end to end, and the back seen in the fold photograph is a tidy, regular cotton weave with clearly defined color changes. Age of this type is read from the drawing, the dye palette and the handle rather than from a signature, and our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same checks we used to place this piece in the 1940s to 1950s. If you are weighing this style against classical city weaving, our comparison of a Persian versus an Oriental rug sets out the differences in construction and design language.