Oxblood and Tan Jaldar Alternating Diamond, Hand-Knotted Wool and Silk Rug

Hand-knotted from wool with silk, with a natural fringe at both ends. The silk carries the fine detail in the serrated medallions and gives the oxblood ground its depth and shifting sheen — on a rug worked this closely within one colour family, that lustre does much of the separating work.

Wool and silk shrink at different rates, so this rug must never be washed, steamed or shampooed — any deep clean is a job for a specialist in mixed-fibre rugs. A deep oxblood ground is among the more forgiving colours a rug can have; the cream in the diamonds and borders is what will grey first.

There is no black on this rug. That is worth saying because the larger diamonds appear to have black centres, and at any normal viewing distance you would describe them that way. Measured, the darkest wool anywhere on the surface is a warm mahogany — hue 16, which is squarely in the red-brown range — and true near-black accounts for a tenth of one per cent of the rug. What looks like a black core is dark red-brown wool doing the job of black.

Keeping the whole palette inside one family is what gives the rug its evenness. From the deepest mahogany at the centre of a medallion to the palest cream in the border, every colour is a warm red or brown at a different depth, and the design is carried by lightness alone across a range running from about 40 to about 170 on a scale to 255. The two diamonds alternate strictly — a large serrated one, then a small plain one, offset row by row so neither ever touches its own kind — and because they are separated by depth rather than by hue, the field reads as a single continuous fabric rather than as two patterns competing. A true black would have broken that, which is presumably why there is none.