9' x 12' Jaipur Oriental Rug | French Floral All-Over Design on Black | Fine Wool, Never Used

A black ground carries a floral drawing better than any other color, and this piece proves it. Hand-knotted in Jaipur with a fine wool pile on a cotton foundation, the field is a continuous French floral trellis of cream vines and rust, salmon and burgundy blossoms set against near-black wool, framed by a wide beige border of dark red palmette cartouches. The rug is brand new and has never been on a floor, with even pile height, straight sides and hand-tied ivory fringe at both ends. At 9' x 12' it is the standard living and dining footprint, so if you are comparing 9x12 area rugs, this one gives you a dark, quiet floor with a great deal of detail up close. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a French floral composition worked as an all-over floral design with no medallion, so the eye travels rather than stops. Thin cream stems branch into serrated leaves and carry fan-shaped palmettes, open carnations, 8 petal rosettes and small closed buds, each one outlined so it lifts off the dark ground. The repeat is mirrored across the center axis, which is why the rug looks symmetrical from a distance and endlessly varied at close range. Three borders frame it: a narrow burgundy guard of linked rosettes, the broad beige main border filled with a hair-thin scrolling vine and punctuated by dark red shield cartouches with orange and teal centers, and a second burgundy guard at the outer edge. The corners are resolved properly, with the cartouche turning the corner rather than being cut off, which is the detail that separates a drawn cartoon from a copied one.

A Black Field With Beige, Red and Cream Accents

Black is the anchor here, a deep unbroken ground that swallows light and makes every other color sit forward. Over it the vinework is cream and pale ivory, the leaves shading toward a soft sage green, and the flowers run through terracotta, rust orange, dusty rose, deep burgundy and a smoky blue gray that appears in the flower centers and in the small border rosettes. The main border is a warm camel beige, light enough to draw a clean rectangle around the dark field, with the palmette cartouches in oxblood and near-black burgundy. Brown tones bridge the two, showing up in the outlines and in the way the pile catches light at an angle. The palette is restrained rather than bright, which makes the rug easy to live with under dark wood, brass and leather, and striking on pale stone or light oak floors.

Woven in Jaipur, India

Jaipur, in Rajasthan, is one of the great hand-knotting centers of the world today, and India is where most of the finest contemporary hand-knotted work is now produced. The weavers there work from full-scale cartoons in the classical court tradition, and the drawing discipline shows in this piece: the vines hold a true curve, the palmettes are fully articulated rather than simplified, and the knot count is high enough to render the thin cream stems without them breaking up. The back, shown in the reverse photograph, is tight and legible with the pattern reading clearly through the cotton foundation, and the selvedges are overcast by hand. It is an Oriental rug in the traditional sense of the term, made entirely by hand with wool pile knotted one row at a time, and at 9' x 12' it represents many months on the loom.