9' x 13'4" Chinese Verdure Tapestry Rug | Green Garden Landscape | Fine Weave Wall Hanging

This is a full verdure landscape, 9' x 13'4" of shaded green woodland with a tiered stone fountain, a walled garden terrace, a distant villa and a stream running out of the lower right corner. It is a decorative Oriental rug in the European tapestry idiom, made by hand in China in wool on a cotton foundation, and it works equally well laid on the floor of a large room or hung flat on a wall as a single panel of art. The surface is smooth and painterly rather than plush, which is exactly what this kind of drawing needs: the shading in the foliage depends on very small color steps that a deep pile would swallow. Condition is excellent, with clean unworn selvages and a plain, tidy reverse visible where the corner is turned back. Every piece we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a verdure, which in the tapestry tradition means greenery first and figures second. Two great trees frame the scene, one leaning in from the left over a tangle of exposed roots and broad leaved undergrowth, the other rising on the right with ivy climbing the trunk and fig shaped leaves spreading over a cut stone retaining wall. Between them the eye travels back through layered oak and cypress foliage to a small classical pavilion with a columned base and a balustrade above it, then further still to a formal garden of clipped topiary, hedges and a distant house. On the right a 4 tier fountain spills into a walled basin, with a single jet at the top and a stream carrying the water forward into the foreground. The 4 borders run a continuous band of scrolling acanthus and ribbon work with scattered rosettes and small birds tucked into the corners, and the whole panel is finished with a plain dark brown outer edge that frames the picture like a moulding.

A Green Palette Built from Dozens of Shades

Green carries the piece, but it is never one green. The canopy moves from a fresh yellow green in the sunlit crowns to sage, olive and a deep near black pine in the shadowed leaves, with the small dark leaf shapes drawn individually against paler ground so the trees keep their depth from across a room. Behind the foliage the sky and distance are worked in warm ivory, cream and pale straw, which is what gives the scene its soft morning light. The fountain and the stream are woven in silver blue and dove grey with white accents on the falling water, the one genuinely cool note in the composition. Stone work, tree trunks and the foreground earth run through tan, camel and mushroom brown, and the border picks up muted terracotta red, powder blue and small ivory flowerheads against a sand colored ground. It is a quiet, faded palette by design, the look of an old European tapestry, and it sits easily with antique wood, leather and warm neutral walls.

Woven in China in the Verdure Tapestry Tradition

Verdure panels of this type began in the great European tapestry towns and were copied and refined for centuries; today the best handmade examples come out of Chinese workshops, where weavers have spent decades reproducing this drawing at a standard that holds up next to the originals. The quality shows in the things that are hard to do: the graded shading in the canopy, the straight courses of the stone wall, the fine white flecks on the water and the crisp scroll of the border, all built stitch by stitch from a full scale cartoon rather than printed or sketched in. At 9' x 13'4" it is a substantial piece, large enough to anchor a formal sitting room or a library and a natural choice among large hand-knotted area rugs, though many buyers of tapestries like this one mount them on a wall where the landscape reads as a single framed view.