Red Oushak Hand-Knotted Plant-Dyed Wool Rug

The house dates this one at a hundred and thirty years, which puts it comfortably inside the antique band as the trade uses that word. A hand-knotted Oushak in red, 118 × 164 cm (3'10" × 5'5"), wool throughout, colored with kök boya.

01From the hand of the weaver

Under two square meters, and there is no second one anywhere. Rugs from that town have been reaching Europe since the fifteenth century, which is why the drawing turns up painted into Renaissance interiors long before anyone in the West was writing about weaving.

02Color, by the light

The characteristic Oushak field is loosely drawn and generously spaced — few motifs, each of them large, on a red or soft yellow ground — and it is the opposite instinct from a court rug, where the ambition is to fill everything.

03What the yarn is

At a hundred and thirty years the plant reds here have gone the whole way toward brick and terracotta, and abrash bands cross the field where one dye bath gave out and another took over. Nothing but wool appears in the yarn record — pile and foundation alike, as village and small-town looms worked.

04Color that shifts through the day

There is no way to be delicate about the condition question on a rug of this age: the pile is low, the ends have been repaired or lost at some point in thirteen decades, and the color at one end will not match the other exactly. Those are the terms on which nineteenth-century rugs exist at all.

05Coming off the loom

It wants a washer who handles antique pieces, and it wants an underlay, because a thin old rug slides. Hand-knotted in Oushak, western Anatolia; wool pile and wool foundation. Kök boya dyeing throughout, with the red long since settled toward brick. Loosely drawn Oushak field — few motifs, generously spaced. Abrash bands cross the field where the dye baths changed. 118 × 164 cm (3'10" × 5'5"), a little under two square meters. About a hundred and thirty years old, with the low pile and end wear that implies. Antique-rug washing only, and use an underlay.

One piece. Rugs like this one are getting harder to find in original condition every year, and that is simply how the world is rather than a reason to hurry.