8' x 8'5" Indian Ziegler Rug | Wool | Beige and Gold

A wool rug of 8' x 8'5", knotted by hand in India in the Ziegler manner: an open field of large palmettes and thin vines, no medallion, held inside a single wide border. The field reads as wheat gold at a distance and the border as warm rust, so the rug looks like two tones until you stand over it and the greens and browns in the flowerheads come up. It is five inches off true square, which puts it in the middle floor sizes and makes it useful in a room where a rectangle would leave awkward margins.

Design

The field carries an all-over repeat rather than a centred one. Serrated palmettes sit in staggered rows, some of them dark and heavy with a pale teardrop centre, others lighter and built from layered leaves around a peach bud, and between them sit flat rosettes seen face on. The vines linking them are drawn thin and curl back on themselves, carrying small buds, split leaves and the occasional feathery frond. The main border alternates a squared flowerhead with an open five-petal rose, with a scrolling device turning each corner, and two narrow guard stripes of little rosettes fence it on both sides. Photographs 6 and 8 show how loosely the drawing is kept, with outlines that wander slightly from one repeat to the next.

Colour

The ground is a warm wheat beige that pulls toward gold where the pile lies away from the light. Against it the palmettes are worked in a dark brown close to aubergine, in sage and soft blue-green, and in a peach that also runs through the vine stems. The border is the one strong note, a rust orange with an apricot cast, cooled by the pale sage guard stripes on either edge. Nothing in the palette is saturated; the whole rug sits in the same register, with the dark palmettes doing the work of contrast.

Making

Hand-knotted with a wool pile, the back legible enough that the border drawing can be read from the reverse, as image 10 shows. The pile is cut at a medium height and the ends finish in plain undyed fringe. The rug is new and the condition is recorded as perfect, with no repairs, no low areas and no colour run at the edges.