8' x 9'9" Indian Traditional Rug | Wool | Rust and Beige

A hand-knotted rug from India, 8' x 9'9" and rectangular, with a wool pile. At a glance it is a dark red field held inside pale sand spandrels, with a green medallion sitting dead centre and a wide ivory border carrying flowers the whole way round. The drawing is traditional and densely packed: palmettes, serrated leaves, rosettes and small boteh, loosely enough drawn that no two repeats look stamped from the same block.

Design

The field is cut as a large octagon, its sides stepped in and its corners filled by plain sand-coloured spandrels that carry their own thin scatter of flowers, birds and little curling vases. Inside the burgundy ground, a stepped and notched medallion in green holds a four-petalled rosette at its heart, ringed by lotus heads and small pink blossoms. Around the medallion the field runs with broad serrated leaves, ivory flower heads, and paired boteh at the top and bottom of the octagon. The border is a three-part arrangement: a wide ivory main band of palmettes and vine linked by a continuous stem, flanked by narrow green guard stripes of alternating leaves and rosettes, and finished with a plain rust outer edge.

Colour

The field reads as a deep rust red, closer to brick where the light crosses the pile and closer to wine where it falls away, and the wool takes the dye unevenly enough to give the ground a faint striation. The medallion is sage green with an olive cast, repeated at a lighter weight in the guard stripes. Everything else sits on a soft beige that shades from oatmeal in the spandrels to a paler cream in the main border. Salmon pink and ivory do most of the detailing in the flowers, with a dark brown, almost black, used sparingly in the border leaves for contrast.

Making

The rug is hand-knotted in wool, and the back photograph shows a close, even weave with the pattern fully legible from behind and a white fringe at both ends. Condition is listed as perfect, a new rug with full pile and square, unworn edges, as with most of the hand-knotted work stocked here. The weight is substantial for its size, and the pile is dense enough to stand up under furniture.