9' x 11'10" Oriental Rug | William Morris Willow Design | Agra Weave, Made in India

This is a William Morris drawing translated into knotted wool, woven in the Agra tradition of northern India and finished at 9' x 11'10", which sits in the standard 9x12 room size most dining and living rooms are built around. Every knot is tied by hand on a cotton foundation, and the wool has been clipped low enough that the fine black outlining around each willow and blossom stays crisp. The piece is brand new and has never been on a floor, yet the palette was dyed to read like a 19th century textile rather than a showroom sample. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming the hand-knotted construction, the wool pile and the country of weave.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over design with no medallion, built from staggered rows of weeping willow and slender cypress forms that alternate point up and point down, so the eye reads the pattern as a continuous garden rather than a repeat. Between the trees sit tight lattices of small 6 petal blossoms and delicate arching stems drawn in near black, the kind of flat, botanical line Morris used in his printed textiles. The main border runs ivory with linked rosettes, curling acanthus leaves and paired serrated palmettes, framed on both sides by narrow rust guard stripes carrying a repeating reciprocal motif. The 4 corners resolve cleanly, which on a pattern this dense is the mark of a well managed cartoon.

A Muted Beige, Rust and Olive Palette

Beige is the governing color, moving from a pale sand in the border ground to a warmer camel across the open parts of the field, and the wool takes light differently from row to row so the background never looks flat. The willow forms are worked in a soft rust red that leans toward salmon where the pile catches the light, while the small blossom lattices are olive green cooled almost to a sage or muted teal. Brown fills the tall drop shaped trees that anchor each row, and black carries every outline, stem and tendril, giving the whole surface its definition. In the border, rust red, olive and ivory trade places around each rosette, with small touches of deep blue green in the flower heads. The overall effect is warm and quiet, closer to old parchment and dried leaves than to a bright traditional red and navy scheme.

Agra Weaving and Indian Craftsmanship

Agra has been a hand-knotting center since the Mughal court workshops, and today India is where most of the world's best contemporary hand-knotted work is produced, so buying an Oriental rug made in India is no compromise. The back photograph shows an even, tightly packed knot grid with no slack rows and straight selvages, which is what lets a drawing this fine hold its line at scale. The wool is dense underfoot but clipped short, a combination that suits a Morris pattern because the detail would disappear in a high pile. Weavers in this tradition still work from a hand painted cartoon, one knot at a time across the full 108" width, and a 9' x 11'10" piece of this density represents many months on the loom.