8'6" x 9'3" Chinese Art Deco Rug | Gold Open Field, Navy Precious Objects Border | 1940s Antique

This is a 1940s Chinese Art Deco piece in the near square 8'6" x 9'3" format, and it is the kind of Oriental rug that decorators hunt for and rarely find in this condition. The whole composition rests on restraint: a wide open field of warm gold wool, almost bare, held inside a deep navy border that reads nearly black in low light. Only a handful of motifs interrupt the field, each one placed like brushwork on silk paper rather than drawn to fill space. The pile is wool on a cotton foundation, hand-knotted, with a dense even clip and a soft sheen you can see in the raking light of the close-up photos. It ships with a certificate of authenticity stating age, origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Deco formula of the period: an uninterrupted field with asymmetric corner sprays and a border of precious objects. One corner carries a large lotus group, broad rounded pads and a star shaped bloom on long whipping stems that curl back into the open ground. The opposite corner answers it with a slender flowering branch of small dark leaves and pale blossoms. Two butterflies drift across the middle of the field, tiny and dark, and a third sits near the upper edge. Inside the navy border the weaver placed a rotating set of scholar and altar objects, a footed vase of blossoms on a gold stand, a shallow bowl with sprouting sprays, a ribboned ruyi shape, and a small pink jar with a low gold table beneath it. A single thin blue guard line separates the field from the border and sharpens the whole frame. Nothing repeats mechanically, which is exactly what separates a hand-drawn Art Deco piece from the copies that came later.

A Golden Field Framed in Deep Navy

Gold is the main color and it carries the rug. In daylight the field reads as warm honey with a butterscotch cast, and it shifts gently across the width with the natural abrash of hand-spun, vegetable dyed wool, lighter in bands, deeper where the light rakes across the pile. The border is a true deep navy, so saturated that it photographs close to black in the corner shots, and it gives the gold enormous lift. Inside the border the accents are quiet and old world: dusty peach on the vase bodies, faded pink on the blossoms and ribbons, soft ochre on the stands, with a pale ivory blossom or two for punctuation. The lotus sprays in the field are worked in teal blue and near black indigo, the only cool notes on the gold ground. It is a two color rug at 10 feet and a six color rug at arm's length, which is why it works under both traditional and modern furniture.

Woven in China in the 1940s

Chinese Art Deco weaving grew out of the Peking and Tientsin workshops of the 1920s and 1930s, where weavers took the old imperial vocabulary of lotus, prunus, butterflies and hundred antiques and set it into open, western styled compositions. This example belongs to the tail of that tradition, woven in the 1940s on a cotton foundation with a thick, heavy wool pile that has taken decades of use without losing height. The back, visible in the photographs, shows clean straight rows and a tight even handle, and the selvages and ends are original with no reduction. If you want to understand how pieces like this are placed in time, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same clues we used here, and you can see the rest of our antique Oriental rugs alongside it.