Style
Aubusson
Every piece in this style, across all of our collections. Narrow them down by size and price.
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- 9 x 12
- 10 x 14
- 12 x 15
- Over 12 x 15
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Stories from the Aubusson Archive
Essays, artist dialogues, and provenance notes drawn from Rug & Kilim’s editorial desk.
Understanding Aubusson Rugs: French Heritage and Timeless Luxury
Among the great weaving traditions of Europe, few names carry the artistic prestige and cultural significance of Aubusson. For centuries, Aubusson rugs have represented the pinnacle of French decorative arts, embodying the refinement, sophistication, and creative ambition that defined some of Europe's most influential artistic movements. Their importance extends far beyond floor coverings; Aubusson rugs occupy a distinguished position within the histories of design, architecture, collecting, and luxury interiors. Originating from the historic weaving center of Aubusson in central France, these rugs emerged as part of a broader tapestry-making tradition that would ultimately influence aristocratic residences, royal palaces, cultural institutions, and significant architectural projects throughout Europe and beyond. Their graceful ornamentation, sophisticated color palettes, and exceptional craftsmanship established them among the most admired carpets ever produced.
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The House the European Stuycks Kept: Madrid’s Royal Loom, Goya’s Cartoons, and the Spanish Carpet
There is a building in Madrid, a short walk from the Atocha station, where the same craft has been practiced without interruption for more than three hundred years. Its brick and its Neo-Mudéjar arches were raised in the nineteenth century, but the work carried on inside them belongs to a lineage older still, to 1720, when Philip V, having lost the Flemish tapestry workshops of the Spanish Netherlands to the Peace of Utrecht, resolved that Spain would simply make its own. He summoned a family of Flemish weavers, the Vandergotens, to Madrid, and founded the Real Fábrica de Tapices de Santa Bárbara. Three centuries later, in the presence of the King and Queen of Spain, the factory marked its tercentenary as one of the last places on earth where royal weaving continues by the hand, exactly as it always has.
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The Artists Behind European Tapestry: A Guide to the Names Worth Knowing
There is a persistent misconception about tapestry, and it is worth correcting at the outset: that the weaving is the whole of the art. It is not. Behind every great European tapestry stands an artist, the author of the design from which the weavers worked, and the history of the medium is in large part the history of these figures. To collect tapestry seriously, or simply to understand it well, is to know their names. What follows is a guide to the artists who matter most, arranged as the tradition itself unfolded, from the royal workshops of the old regime to the modern revival that made tapestry, once again, one of the most ambitious art forms in the world.
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Provenance, Structure, Intelligibility: The Three Pillars of Serious Collecting
Anyone can acquire a rug. To collect one, to bring it into a serious collection with the confidence that it belongs there, requires a discipline, and that discipline rests on three questions. Across four decades of building one of the most significant archives in the country, this house has come to evaluate every object through the same three. They are the difference between buying and collecting, and they are worth setting down plainly, because they apply as readily to a Safavid fragment as to a signed Aubusson, and because they are the same three questions, at bottom, that a curator at the Metropolitan or a specialist at Christie's brings to any object of consequence.
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Savonnerie, Aubusson, Gobelins: The Three Ateliers That Defined What Europe Believed a Rug Could Be
In the final years of the sixteenth century, the treasury of France was hemorrhaging. Not to war alone though there had been enough of that but to the East. French silver was flowing steadily toward Persia and the Levant in exchange for knotted-pile carpets, objects of such refinement and such authority that no European workshop had yet produced anything capable of competing with them. Henri IV, who had survived the Wars of Religion and the bankruptcy of a kingdom to sit on the French throne, was not a man inclined to accept a problem he could solve. He installed Pierre Dupont — weaver, entrepreneur, and the most technically accomplished carpet-maker in France in the galleries of the Louvre itself, in workshops beneath the palace's own roof, with a single instruction: make something that does not require us to send money to Persia.
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Rug of the Week IV: Mandaroux’s Le Carnaval — A Mid-Century Aubusson Tapestry in the Age of Postwar Reinvention
NO. 33873 Vintage French Aubusson Mandaroux Tapestry in Green with Pictorial | Rug & Kilim >> When the name Aubusson appears in a conversation among connoisseurs, it evokes an institution: five centuries of tapestry production that has furnished the courts of France, the grand hôtels particuliers of Paris, and the most ambitious interiors of Europe. Yet, the 20th century forced Aubusson into an existential shift. With the Second World War leaving both industry and identity fractured, the ateliers of central France were compelled to modernize. Painters, architects, and designers were invited to collaborate, transforming tapestry from historicist ornament into a modern art form.
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