9'10" x 13'10" Chinese Aubusson Rug | Black Floral Field | Hand-Knotted Wool Pile, Excellent Condition

This 9'10" x 13'10" piece takes the 18th century Aubusson vocabulary of French salon weaving and rebuilds it knot by knot in wool pile, on a jet black ground that makes every blossom read like it is lit from the front. It is a genuinely large room piece, one of those room size 10 x 14 rugs that anchors a full seating group or an 8 chair dining table without crowding the walls, and as a hand-knotted Oriental rug it behaves nothing like the printed and machine-made imitations of the same look. The wool has kept its sheen, the pile stands full and even end to end, and the ivory cotton fringe is clean and untrimmed. It has never been used, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as an authentic hand-knotted piece.

Design and Motifs

The composition is built in two frames. A narrow ivory panel border floats inside the field and encloses a central rectangle packed with bouquets of roses, tulips, peonies and lilies tied by curling ribbon and leaf, while the outer field carries the same all-over floral language at larger scale. The 4 corners hold heavy carved acanthus scrolls and cornucopia forms spilling fruit and blossom, and the long sides are punctuated by two ivory strapwork cartouches, each set with a small rosette at its center. Every flower is drawn with shaded petals and an outlined edge, so the bouquets sit forward off the black instead of dissolving into it. The outer guard band is a taupe brown strip of repeating palmette leaves, a quiet finish that keeps a busy field from running out to the selvedge.

A Black Ground Read in Peach, Ivory and Sage

The field is a true deep black with no blue or brown cast, and it functions here as a stage rather than a color. Against it the flowers run through a warm range of peach, apricot, blush salmon and soft coral, lifted to cream and near white at the petal tips so each bloom has its own highlight. Foliage is worked in muted sage and olive with grey green shading and pale grey outlines, a cooler counterweight that stops the whole thing from turning pink. The scrollwork and cartouches are ivory shaded into buff and honey gold, which gives them a carved, almost plaster relief look, and the outer guard band picks up a dusty taupe brown that ties back to the wood tones in a room. The ivory inner panel line and the cream fringe repeat that light note at both ends.

Aubusson Design, Woven in China

Aubusson is a town in central France whose workshops defined European floral carpet design from the 17th century onward, mostly as flat tapestry weave. This rug is a hand-knotted interpretation of that tradition, made in China, where the best contemporary workshops have specialized in Aubusson and Savonnerie patterns for decades and weave them in pile rather than flatweave. The advantage is obvious in the hand: a dense wool pile on a cotton foundation, clipped level so the drawing stays crisp, with enough knots per square inch to hold the curved petal edges and fine ribbon scrolls that this pattern demands. The wool is springy and lustrous, the selvedges are tight, and the back shows an even, disciplined weave across all 118 inches of width, which is exactly what separates a workshop piece from a decorative copy.