Gold and Grey French Floral Panel, Hand-Knotted Wool Rug

100% wool pile, hand-knotted, with a natural fringe at both ends. At this size the rug is light enough to lift and shake out, which is the easiest way to keep it clean.

The whole palette here is pale — gold, grey, cream and soft coral — so this rug is less forgiving than a red or dark one, with little tonal contrast to disguise a mark. The grey centre panel is the most exposed area: it is the largest plain expanse and on a mat this size it sits where a foot lands.

This design did not come from Persia. The cusped panel set into a plain field, the bouquet of roses and carnations gathered at its centre, the swags of flowers above and below, the soft grey and butter gold — all of it belongs to the French court carpets of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Savonnerie and Aubusson workshops that furnished Versailles. Persian and Indian weavers took the style up in the nineteenth century, when European taste became a large part of the export market, and it has been woven in the East ever since.

What marks it out from an Oriental design is how the flowers are drawn. A Persian palmette is constructed — symmetrical, built from rules, the same on both sides of its axis. These roses are observed: the petals overlap and cast small shadows, the carnations curl at their edges, the leaves turn and foreshorten as real leaves do. Look at the large rose at the centre of the panel and you can see which way it is facing. That is a European habit of seeing, worked in a technique that is entirely Eastern, and the combination is what gives rugs like this their particular softness.