9' x 12' Pakistani Bokhara Rug | Wool | Red and Ivory

A 9' x 12' carpet hand-knotted in Pakistan with a soft, lustrous wool pile, worked in the Bokhara design. At a glance it reads as a single deep red field ruled into a close grid of octagonal medallions, with a wide, densely striped border at each side and a paler band of ivory and apricot rosettes running round the whole.

The design

The field carries rows of octagonal guls, each one outlined in black and quartered by a cross, with hooked leaf forms in apricot, ivory and grey filling the quarters. Between the rows sit smaller stepped diamonds with radiating hooks, which keeps the ground busy without breaking the alignment of the columns. The border is built from many narrow bands rather than one wide one: guard stripes of dots and barbs, a main band of eight-pointed rosettes alternating ivory and apricot on near-black, and an outermost lattice of diamonds with small triangular filler figures, visible clearly at the corner in the close photographs. Both ends finish in a plain elem panel and a plaited edge above the ivory fringe, and the rectangular format is held square along its length.

The colour

The ground is a saturated red, close to cherry where the light strikes the pile and dropping to a darker garnet in the shadows, which is why the same field looks lighter in the overhead shots than in the raking ones. Against it, the gul outlines and border ground are a soft, near-charcoal black and grey, with slate grey used inside the medallions as a cool counterweight. Ivory and a warm apricot do the lifting: they pick out the rosettes in the border and the hooked arms inside each gul, and they are the only light values in an otherwise dark and even palette.

The making

Hand-knotted in wool on a workshop loom in Pakistan, with a pile clipped short enough to hold the small stepped motifs cleanly, as the folded-back corner shows. The wool has the soft sheen the trade looks for in this class of Bokhara, and it reads slightly differently from either end of the rug because of the way the nap lies. The rug is new and the condition is listed as perfect: full pile edge to edge, intact selvedges and even, unclipped fringes at both ends.