9'2" x 12'2" Jaipur Oriental Rug | William Morris All-Over Floral | Brand New, Never Used

This 9'2" x 12'2" rug was hand-knotted in the workshops of Jaipur, in northern India, with a wool pile on a cotton foundation and a William Morris drawing carried right across the field. It is a true Oriental rug in the workshop sense: drawn from a cartoon, knotted by hand, clipped to an even medium pile that shows the outlines cleanly. The rug is brand new and has never been on a floor, with full pile height, straight sides, and a clean cream fringe at both ends, as the folded and rolled photographs show. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, materials and origin.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over design built on a soft ogee lattice, with long curving leaf spines meeting at the points and a large lotus palmette set in the center of each compartment. Between the palmettes sit smaller rosettes, 4 petal and 8 petal blossoms, tulip buds and tiny scrolling vines, so no part of the ground is left empty yet nothing crowds. The drawing is symmetrical along both axes, which is what gives a rug this size its calm. The main border reverses the scheme: large fan shaped palmettes and heavy acanthus scrolls laid over black, separated by paired serrated leaves, and framed on both sides by a tan guard band of small cross rosettes and a fine reciprocal vine on the outer edge. It is the Arts and Crafts vocabulary, the flowing plant forms Morris drew for his own textiles, translated into knotted wool by weavers working in a much older technical tradition.

Sage Green, Black and Rust

The ground is a muted sage green with a warm taupe cast, a color that reads quiet from across a room and then opens up as you get closer. Against it, the lotus heads are worked in deep rust and burgundy, olive and forest green, apricot, dusty rose and clear ivory, with small notes of slate blue in the leaves and mustard gold in the little scattered rosettes. The lattice spines are outlined in claret and pale celadon, which is what keeps the pattern legible at walking distance. The main border is a true blue black, near ink in the raking light of the rolled photograph, and it acts as a hard frame that makes the green field look lighter than it is. Tan and camel guard stripes step the eye out from the black to the ivory fringe. The whole palette is warm and slightly antiqued rather than bright, so it sits comfortably with wood floors, leather, brass and stone.

Woven in Jaipur, India

Jaipur has become one of the most important weaving centers in the world for fine contemporary hand-knotted work, and this rug is a good example of why. The knotting is regular, the rows are even, the outlines hold their curve through the palmette petals, and the selvedges are tightly overcast, all visible in the folded back photograph. Wool is well spun and lanolin rich, which gives the pile its light sheen and will let a rug of this weight take heavy traffic for decades. At 9'2" x 12'2" it belongs in the standard 9x12 rugs group, big enough to set all four legs of a full seating arrangement on the pile or to run a 10 seat table with chairs pulled back, and honest about its origin: made in India, in the William Morris idiom, with no pretence of being anything else.