8' x 10' Chinese Aubusson Rug | French Floral Medallion | Bamboo Silk Pile in Dark Green

This is a hand-knotted reading of the French Aubusson manner on a deep green ground, and the bamboo silk pile is what makes it unusual. The fibre reflects light the way reeled silk does, so the ivory center medallion and the honey-gold scrollwork shift from pale to burnished as you walk around the piece, while the green field stays dark and velvety. The drawing is entirely curved: rococo shells, acanthus volutes and loose garden bouquets, with nothing geometric anywhere in the composition. At 8' x 10' it covers a standard seating group with the front legs of the furniture on the pile, which is the size most buyers of 8 x 10 rugs are shopping for. Condition is perfect, the pile is full and evenly clipped, the ivory cotton fringe is intact at both ends, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a shaped ivory cartouche outlined in aubergine and gold, filled with a painterly bouquet of cabbage roses, small daisies, buds and blue forget-me-nots, the same bouquet a French tapestry weaver would have drawn from a cartoon. Gold acanthus scrolls curl off the cartouche at top and bottom and unfold into large volutes that push out toward the corners. An inner frame of burgundy carries a beaded ivory ribbon band and runs like a picture frame around the green field, broken at each of the 4 corners by a large ivory cartouche holding its own smaller bouquet. Outside that frame the green ground returns, scattered with trailing leafy vines, single roses and buds in olive and gold that run right up to the selvage. Every quadrant is drawn slightly differently, so the eye keeps finding new sprays rather than reading a repeat.

A Study in Emerald, Burgundy and Champagne Gold

The field is a deep emerald, close to hunter green, and because of the sheen of the pile it reads almost black where the light falls away and bottle green where it catches. Against it the inner frame is a dark oxblood burgundy, warm rather than bright, which keeps the contrast rich instead of harsh. The medallion and corner cartouches are ivory drifting to champagne, edged in a plum brown that gives the shapes their crisp outline. The scrollwork moves through honey, antique gold and tan, and the flowers add rose pink, dusty coral, deep raspberry, soft powder blue and cream, with olive and moss leaves tying the bouquets back into the ground. It is a saturated, formal palette that suits paneled rooms, dark wood and antique furniture, and it sits at the deeper end of what buyers expect from green area rugs.

Chinese Workshop Weaving in the Aubusson Tradition

Aubusson is a town in central France whose workshops defined this style of floral, medallion-centered floor covering for the European court houses of the 17th and 18th centuries. The originals were flatwoven tapestry; this one is hand-knotted, which is a different and more demanding process, and it is the work of a Chinese atelier weaving to cartoon in the same drawing tradition. That is exactly what the trade means by an Oriental rug: hand-knotted in Asia, judged on knot count, drawing and dye quality rather than on a brand name. The knot density here is high enough to hold a continuous curved line through the scrollwork without stepping, the pile is clipped low so the fine detail in the bouquets stays legible, and the back shows straight, even rows over a cotton foundation with a tidy selvage and hand-tied fringe. Recent weaving, never laid in a home, and priced as a finished decorative piece rather than an antique.