Tapestry
The Rug & Kilim Tapestry Collection stands as one of the foremost private archives of historical textile arts, representing forty years of disciplined acquisition across premier international markets and private holdings. This distinguished repertoire, anchored by rare and museum-caliber textiles, presents an authoritative chronicle of weaving traditions from the most important provenances and workshops.
Some of the earliest treasures in this never-before-seen archive include 17th-century tapestries, centuries-old Persian fragments, salt bags and horse covers, antique and vintage textiles of the Swedish Rölakan and Flamskväv traditions, Flemish tapestries, tribal textiles and folk art of all primitivist origins, and a particular emphasis of 18th-century Neoclassical tapestries (being one of our principal’s deepest passions in design history). Some of the new and especially exciting additions are signed vintage American and European tapestries, with works by mid-century masters like Henry Easterwood, Jean Lurcat, André Arbus, Etienne Poirier, Lucien Coutaud, Jean Picart Le Doux, Jean-Claude Bissery, Edmond Dubrunfaut, René Fumeron, and Paule and Jules Leleu.
This line’s diverse inclusion of rare provenances, special workshops, and important artists is perhaps matched only by its representation of exotic yarns and weaving styles, with a notable range of silk and metallic-threads long sought-after by admirers of the craft.
- Modern
- 19th Century & Earlier
- Americana
- Oriental
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Stories from the Tapestry Archive
Essays, artist dialogues, and provenance notes drawn from Rug & Kilim’s editorial desk.
Signatures, Editions, and the Bolduc on Modern and Rare Tapestries: The Mark of the Masters and Artists
There is a particular pleasure, known to every serious collector, in turning an object over. The front of a great tapestry or carpet is what seduces; the back, and the edges, are what tell the truth. And on the finest modern tapestries, that truth is written in a specific and often misunderstood language, a language of signatures, edition numbers, and a small woven label the French call the bolduc. To read it fluently is to hold the difference between a decorative object and a documented work of art. It is the same literacy that governs the print room and the rare book library, where a collector learns to read a plate mark, a watermark, a colophon. The modern tapestry, elevated to the status of fine art by Jean Lurçat and his circle in the mid-twentieth century, borrowed the apparatus of the fine art edition precisely because it wished to be understood as fine art. To understand the apparatus is to understand the ambition.
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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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The Long Life of a Green: On Celery, Color of the Year, and the Four Centuries of Weaving That Anticipated It
Every year, the color world makes its pronouncement, and every year the design world turns to see what it has been given. For 2027, Sherwin-Williams has named Celery; a light, airy, herbal green with a yellow undertone, chosen, in the company's words, for a moment that prizes wellness, balance, and connection. It is a soft color with a quiet glow and a faint edge; it pairs, its makers note, with white for something breezy, with cranberry red for something playful, with brown for something elevated. It is, by any measure, a beautiful and intelligent choice. It is also a color the great weavers of the world have understood for four hundred years.
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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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Rug & Kilim’s Tapestry Artists’ Series: In Dialogue with Elizabeth Chester
There is a particular kind of looking that a great tapestry demands, slower than painting, more physical than sculpture, closer to reading than to seeing. The eye must travel. It must follow the thread, understand the structure, and then, having understood it, surrender to the illusion that the structure has been designed to create. The greatest European tapestries have always operated this way: technically transparent to the scholar and visually overwhelming to everyone else simultaneously. It is the most demanding of the textile arts, and the one that rewards sustained attention most completely.
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The Layered Home: 5 Ways to Rethink Floor Rugs and Wall Tapestries
The real spatial dimension does not get painted, it gets woven. Begin with hanging a piece such as Signed Vintage Lia Cook Tapestry slightly off-center on one of your main walls. Its intricate Jacquard weave and the friction created between its rayon and linen fibers will require a lot of breathing room, immediately establishing a gravitational pull of the whole room. But to balance this vertical tension, the ground beneath your feet needs to become much more rigorous. With the use of a rigorously beaten warp-faced plane such as cotton Indian Dhurrie or Antique Swedish Röllakan's interlocking tapestry weave, you create a flat but structurally resistant base. A ground made from a rigidly woven material needs to be challenged. The last textural transition will come from placing a Vintage Frazada Kilim with heavy weft interlace across your warp-faced plane. The act of overlapping your heavy weft on a rigorously
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