FEATURES OF CHINESE RUG PATTERNS
The simplicity which distinguishes Chinese coloring may be said equally to distinguish the design. This is more true of the old fabrics than of those of later origin. In fact, one of the distinguishing marks of the old rugs is the use of very simple patterns and usually a narrow border, consisting of some form of the fret or wave pattern which in architecture is known as “Greek,” but which appears with the swastika (卐), of which it is a clear development, in the primitive art of all races, and which in China has been employed most freely from the earliest times.
A RUG CONSISTENT IN ITS STRICTLY FLORAL CHARACTER
Well balanced, and modelled after the Kien Lung designs, but probably made later. The color effect is sprightly
Just when or at what stage of Chinese religious culture the dragon came into Chinese art we probably do not know; but it is found in the earliest rugs we have trace of. In these, however, it shares the prevailing simplicity, is strictly conventional in character, usually laid in blue and worked into the shape of a circular medallion, or sometimes, in conjunction with the fret, into corner devices. These, however, seem to have been appropriated from the Persian along with the central medallion.
MAT OF A VERY EARLY PERIOD
The purest of designs in gold and brown
As time and the art progressed there crept into the design a greater opulence, a higher degree of elaboration. Something of the floral richness of Persia was absorbed, and it abides to this day; but everything adopted was transformed, in color and treatment, to fit into the Chinese decorative scheme. Instead of a profuse mass of floral material, one flower was taken as a motive and presented in repeating fashion, duly emphasized, and with no multiplicity of other floral factors to detract from it. In almost every case the flower had an ethical or religious meaning which became the keynote of the rug.
In this connection it may be said that there is no art in the world in which so great a part of the prevailing figures has a generally recognized symbolic meaning.