8' x 10' Aubusson Rug | Flat Weave Rose Medallion | Antique Red & Gold | Excellent Condition

This is a flat woven Aubusson in the French salon tradition, made by hand in China in wool on a cotton foundation and finished at 8' x 10', one of the easiest room sizes to place and one of the most requested among our 8x10 rugs. There is no pile here at all: the surface is a tight tapestry weave, smooth and almost painterly under the hand, which is why the roses and ribbons read with such clean edges in the photographs. It sits flat under furniture, slides neatly under a dining table, and carries the formality of an 18th century French carpet without the weight or height of a knotted pile rug. The condition is excellent, and the piece ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming that it is entirely handmade.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Aubusson salon layout. A round central reserve holds a loose bouquet of full blown roses and a single grey blue bloom, ringed first by a narrow scrolling band and then by a wide antique red ring filled with 8 petal star flowers and leaf sprays. That circle sits inside a large octagonal panel outlined in beaded and ribbon twist framing, with rose sprays, trailing ribbons and curling acanthus filling the open ground at each side. The 4 corners of the field each carry an oval cartouche painted with its own small bouquet, set against the red ground. The border is the showpiece: a continuous garland of roses, daisies and broad leaves swinging along an undulating vine, tied at intervals with ribbon and closed by a plain rust outer band and a fine guard stripe. Every element is symmetrical about both axes, so the rug reads correctly from any seat in the room.

A Palette of Antique Red, Gold and Faded Rose

The colour scheme is deliberately softened, the way genuine period Aubussons look after a century of light. The field inside the octagon is a warm golden beige that lifts to near ivory at the centre of the medallion, so the eye travels inward without being pulled. Around it the ground turns antique red, a brick toned madder rather than a bright crimson, and the outer band deepens again to rust terracotta at the selvedge. The flowers are worked in pale rose, salmon and apricot with cream highlights on the petal tips, and the foliage is a muted sage green with olive shading, never a fresh grass green. Small touches of straw yellow and dusty pink appear in the corner cartouches. Against a mid tone oak floor, as shown in the room photographs, the red reads warm and the gold reads almost candlelit, which makes this an easy rug to live with in a room of cream walls, dark wood and gilt.

Origin and Weaving Quality

Aubusson is a town in central France whose workshops wove flat tapestry carpets for the aristocracy from the 17th century onward. The technique travelled, and for decades the finest hand woven reproductions of these French designs have come out of Chinese workshops, where weavers work the wool weft by hand across a cotton warp, shuttle by shuttle, building the picture rather than knotting a pile. That is what you have here: a true hand woven Oriental rug in the European idiom, made in China, with the weft count high enough to render curved stems, shaded petals and beaded outlines without any stepping in the line. Look at the corner detail and you can see the diagonal interlock where one colour meets the next, the mark of hand tapestry work rather than machine production. The finish is neat, the selvedges are firm, and the flat construction means the rug will hold its shape and its drawing for generations.