User:Tanmar0/Aubusson Rugs and Carpets



Aubusson rugs, usually of significant size, handwoven at the villages of Aubusson and Felletin, in the departement of Creuse Valley near Limoges in central France.

Workshops to produce flat-woven rugs were established under royal warrant in 1743 to manufacture pile carpets primarily for the nobility, to whom the Savonnerie court production was not available. It remains unknown when carpet weaving began in this area, but it is certain that tapestries were first woven there long before the Gothic era. Many weavers who settled in France were Huguenots who had fled Spain during the Inquisition in the early sixteenth century. By issuing the edict of Nantes, Henry IV granted all non-Catholics freedom of worship, thereby protecting the carpet weavers in Aubusson. Aubusson weavers became the finest craftsmen in the world. Louis XIV's influential Prime Minister Colbert established the long and hard apprenticeship necessary to obtain the title "Master of Tapestry". Even today, the center in Aubusson, under control of the French Ministry of Arts, is busily producing carpets and rugs of the most exquisite quality. Antique Savonnerie and Aubusson rugs and carpets are considered to be among the finest examples of carpet production undertaken in Europe over the past 350 years.

Many of the early Aubussons were made in modified Oriental designs, some resembling Ushak carpets. Tast soon changed to a range of Renaissance floral and architectural patterns similar to those in use at the Savonnerie and continued to reflect court and republican fashions up to the modernistic painterly concepts of the 20th century.