9'2" x 12'5" Agra Oriental Rug | Rust Field with Black Floral Border | Fine Wool, Vegetable Dye, Never Used

This 9'2" x 12'5" rug is a new, never used piece hand-knotted in fine wool on a cotton foundation, drawn in the classic Agra manner with a soft rust field, a deep black main border and gold guard stripes. It is a formal Oriental rug in the truest sense: court drawing, hand spun wool, and a palette built on muted earth tones rather than bright commercial color. At 9 by 12 and a half feet it covers a full seating group or a 10 seat dining table, and it sits squarely in the most useful of all room sizes, which is why buyers searching 9x12 Oriental rugs keep coming back to this drawing. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming it is genuine hand-knotted work.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. The field carries an all over floral design, a lattice of thin vines rising in vertical repeats and carrying large gold palmettes, 8 petal rosettes with small cross shaped centers, serrated leaves, tulip heads and tiny flowering sprays that fill every open space between them. Look at the close photographs and you can see how the drawing is built: each palmette is outlined in dark brown, filled in gold, then shaded with a second tone of orange so the flower reads as though it has depth. The black main border runs a bold undulating vine set with alternating gold and orange rosettes and curling acanthus leaves, framed on both sides by an ivory and gold guard stripe of boxed geometric cells, then finished with a narrow black minor stripe of green and rust clover heads. The corners resolve cleanly at all 4 turns, with the border vine reading continuously rather than breaking, which is the mark of a properly mapped cartoon.

Rust, Gold and Green Across the Field

The main color is rust, a warm brick to terracotta ground that shifts with the light and carries a gentle tonal movement from row to row, the honest signature of small dye lots rather than a flat machine color. Against it the ornament works in 3 clear registers: warm gold and apricot for the large palmettes and rosettes, sage and deeper pine green for the leaves and a handful of flower heads, and dark brown to near black for the outlines that hold the drawing together. Scattered orange blossoms and small beige to ivory buds lift the field, while the black border reads almost charcoal in raking light and throws the gold guard stripe forward. Green appears in measured doses, mostly in leaf pairs and rosette centers, which keeps the overall effect warm rather than busy. In a room with wood floors, oiled leather and olive upholstery, as in the styled photograph, the rust ground reads soft and antique rather than red.

Agra Weaving and the Quality of the Knot

Agra, the Mughal capital on the Yamuna, produced some of the greatest court carpets of the 17th century, and the vocabulary of vine, palmette and boxed guard stripe used on this rug comes straight out of that tradition. The rug itself is new and made in India, which today is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work is woven, on upright looms by weavers who still read a hand painted cartoon knot by knot. The evidence is in the photographs: fine wool pile with a lustrous clipped surface, tight even knotting visible where the corner is folded back, straight selvedges, and small motifs such as the clover heads in the minor border that only hold their shape at a respectable knot count. The wool is dense enough to take heavy traffic under a dining table, and the flat weave of the back shows a well beaten, evenly tensioned foundation across all 110 inches of width.