Early 20th Century Chinese Yellow Beige Blue Handwoven Wool Carpet

An early 20th century Chinese area rug, the golden yellow field with an overall pattern of sparse disparate floral and geometric shapes around a central roundel with unusual line patterns and around four dragon roundels in the corners within a series of borders in gold and blue.

Often employing silk textiles, antique Chinese rugs and carpets were produced in medallion as well as rectangular formats. These tend to be more open and spacious than the Oriental carpets from the Western Asia. Maintained mostly in blues, golds, ivories and beiges, with classical symbols of longevity, elaborate lotus blossoms, chrysanthemums, cloud-band motifs, foo-dogs and birds, Chinese are frequently visible in paintings from as early as the T'ang Period. In contrast to earlier Chinese antique kilim rugs, the twentieth-century Chinese Art Deco rugs can be quite spare in design and quite radical in color, catering to the western taste shaped by the birth of the modernist movement. They often comprised of geometric or abstract patterns.