8'8" x 11'7" Needlepoint Tapestry Rug | French Floral Rose Bouquets | Never Used

This is a hand-stitched needlepoint tapestry worked in wool on a cotton ground, drawn in the French floral manner that made the Aubusson and Savonnerie workshops famous, and finished at 8'8" x 11'7", a true room size that sits with 9x12 Oriental rugs under most dining tables and seating groups. There is no pile height here: the surface is flat, firm and evenly stitched, closer to a tapestry than to a knotted rug, which is exactly why these pieces look so crisp under furniture and in bright rooms. It dates to the 2000s and has never been used, so the ivory ground is clean, the wool colours are unfaded and the edges and ends are intact, as the corner photographs show. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity describing the weave, materials, size and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field has no medallion. Instead, full bouquets of cabbage roses, peonies and single poppies are set in staggered rows across the open ivory ground, with smaller sprays and buds filling the spaces between them. Thin leafy garlands arc from bouquet to bouquet, so the eye reads a loose lozenge lattice without any hard outline anywhere in the drawing. Each bouquet is built the same way a painter would build it: a large apricot gold blossom at the centre, pink and raspberry roses turning away from it on either side, and sage leaves tipped in darker green closing the group. The border is a continuous rose garland, drawn large enough to read from standing height, held between narrow dusty rose guard stripes, and finished with a plain ivory outer band that frames the whole design cleanly. Corners are mitred so the garland turns without a break, which is a good sign of careful charting rather than quick copying.

Ivory Ground with Rose Pink, Sage Green and Soft Gold

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to white, and it carries the whole palette without competing with it. The roses run through three clear steps of pink: pale blush on the outer petals, mid rose at the heart and a deep raspberry red for the poppies and the shadowed buds. Gold appears as apricot and honey in the central blossoms, with small ochre dots scattered through the filler sprays. Foliage is split between a dull sage grey green used for the leaves that fall back and a deep forest green for the leaves that come forward, and that two tone treatment is what gives the bouquets their depth. The guard stripes and the fine outlines are a muted dusty rose brown, the quietest colour in the rug. As a whole it reads as a soft pastel piece, which makes it easy to place with painted furniture, linen upholstery and other ivory and beige rugs.

Made in China in the French Needlepoint Tradition

Pieces like this are made in China, where workshops took over the European needlepoint tradition and have produced the best of it for decades. The technique is different from a knotted weave: wool is stitched through an open canvas ground, one stitch at a time, following a painted chart, so the quality of the piece comes down to stitch count and to how faithfully the shading is followed. Here the stitching is tight and regular, with no gaps showing through on the ivory ground and no muddled transitions inside the petals, and the back is as flat and tidy as the face. The result is a thin, strong and surprisingly heavy floor piece that resists crushing under table legs, and it is a good example of why an Oriental rug can mean a flat tapestry weave just as readily as a deep pile. Unused and perfect at 8'8" x 11'7", it is ready to go straight down.