Oushak Rugs
Oushak is a town in western Anatolia that has been weaving for export since the fifteenth century. Its rugs are the clearest case in the trade of colour mattering more than pattern: soft apricot, gold, pale blue and ivory, laid out in large loose drawing on a coarse knot with a long pile. Look at an Oushak from across a room, not from directly above it.
Colour first
Most weaving traditions are identified by their designs. Oushak is identified by its palette. The characteristic colours are soft and warm rather than saturated: apricot, terracotta, soft gold, a chalky pale blue, cinnamon, and a great deal of ivory. Even the reds lean toward brick and madder rather than deep crimson. This is partly the dyeing and partly the wool, which is long in the fibre and takes colour with a sheen that lifts a pale tone instead of flattening it. The practical result is that an Oushak carries a room without dominating it, which is one reason the type has survived every change in taste for five hundred years while more assertive weaves have gone in and out of fashion.
Five centuries of export
Anatolian rugs of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries reached Europe in enough quantity to appear in European paintings, and art historians still name whole groups after the painters who recorded them: the Holbein carpets after Hans Holbein the Younger, the Lotto carpets after Lorenzo Lotto. The great medallion and star Ushaks of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries belong to the same tradition, woven in large formats for palaces, for mosques and for the export trade alike. Production carried on through the nineteenth century, when a softer and more open decorative style developed for the American and European markets. That history is why Oushak sits comfortably with European furnishing and next to a French Aubusson in a way that few Persian rugs manage.
The knot is coarse, and that is deliberate
Oushak uses the symmetric knot common across Turkish weaving, at a low density, and leaves the pile long. Fine detail is therefore not available and was never attempted. The designs are drawn large: broad palmettes, open lattices, single medallions with plenty of ground around them, wide and simple borders. Asymmetry is normal. A motif on one side of the field will not exactly match its partner on the other, and bands of shifting colour run across the ground where the dye lot changed. On a rug like this both read as life rather than as error. Anyone who needs the two halves of a rug to match should be looking at workshop weaving, not at Oushak.
Pile, wool and how it ages
The wool is the reason the type is worth having. Anatolian highland fleece is long and lustrous, and on a deep pile that produces a surface which changes as you move down the room. It also means the rug flattens rather than wearing through. An old Oushak with a compressed pile has not failed, it has settled, and the colour usually improves on the way. Foundations vary: wool warp and weft on older village pieces, cotton on later and on current production.
Where an Oushak is the wrong rug
A long pile in a pale palette is an honest problem in a dirty room. Sand and grit sink into a loose, deep pile and stay there, and a chalky ivory ground shows what a navy ground hides. So an Oushak is a poor choice for an entrance hall, for a kitchen, or for a house with a large dog and a muddy garden. The coarse knot is also unforgiving of moth, because there is a lot of exposed wool and not much density to slow the damage down. For the same soft effect in a room that takes real traffic, a tighter weave on a darker ground will serve better. For colour doing the work while the drawing stays crisp, the geometric Kazak tradition is the nearer relative.
What is being woven now
Oushak is by now as much a design as a place. Rugs in the manner are woven in Turkey and in India, frequently with handspun wool and plant dyes, and the soft open style makes them one of the easier antique-derived designs to place in a contemporary room. They belong to the transitional group rather than the strictly traditional one. Scale is part of the appeal: the drawing was built for large and 12x18 floors, and a big Oushak in a pale rust or gold is one of the few antique-styled carpets that does not make a modern room look like a museum.
