Aubusson rug; France, Restoration Period, c. 1820

Aubusson rug; France, Restoration period, c. 1820
Wool and silk
Has faults
Measurements:

Elegant rug woven in the Aubusson workshops during the Restoration period. Executed in flat weaving technique, it combines wool and silk to achieve a surface of great chromatic richness.

The composition is articulated around a large central circular medallion of radial character, ornamented with polychrome floral motifs, arranged on an olive green field. The design is organized by means of a symmetrical structure of neoclassical inspiration, with garlands, rosettes and stylized vegetal elements that refer to the ornamental taste inherited from the 18th century.

The field is framed by a wide compartmentalized architectural border, decorated with floral bouquets, wreaths and geometric motifs.

The town of Aubusson was home to numerous workshops that were created by Flemish weavers who settled in the area at the end of the 16th century. They had a rudimentary operation, compared to the Royal Gobelins Manufacture: they had no painters, no dyers, and no commercial structure, so their pieces were sold in inns, to a lower class private clientele, mainly provincial aristocrats. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Aubusson workshops specialized in vegetable tapestries (with eminently floral decoration), but the situation changed radically when, in the mid-seventeenth century, this center was reorganized by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of Louis XIV, with the aim of converting these workshops into royal manufactories. He then subjected the Aubusson and Felletin workshops to a guild regulation and, in exchange, promised to provide them with a painter and a dyer.

This promise, however, would not become effective until the 18th century, a turning point for the workshops of La Marche, which would see a considerable increase in the quality of their tapestries by being able to count on a painter dedicated to making cartons and a dyer who would produce dyes of a higher quality than those used until then. Until the 18th century, the tapestries of La Marche were characterized by their thick density (50-60 threads per square decimeter), poor quality wool, sometimes very poorly refined, limited colors with a predominance of earthy and green (almost never red, the most expensive and most complicated color to manufacture), poor drawing, with few figures, hence the predominance of vegetable tapestries, and little silk, eminently using wool.