Aubusson and Savonnerie

Two French manufactories, two techniques

Aubusson is a town in the Creuse, with Felletin next door, where tapestry has been woven since the sixteenth century and which was granted the status of royal manufactory in 1665, under Colbert. Aubusson rugs were produced there from the eighteenth century and in large numbers throughout the nineteenth.

The Savonnerie is something else. It is a manufactory founded in Paris in 1627, under Louis XIII, set up in a former soap works at Chaillot, from which it takes its name. It produced knotted-pile rugs for the crown; the great commission is the series intended for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre under Louis XIV. It was merged with the Gobelins by an ordinance of 1825, the looms being transferred there the following year.

Two places, two periods, two opposing techniques. An Aubusson has no pile; a Savonnerie has one. That is the first thing to check, and it is checked with the hand.

The Aubusson: a tapestry laid on the floor

An Aubusson rug is a tapestry. It is woven on a low-warp loom, horizontal, with woollen wefts beaten down on warps of wool, linen or cotton until they cover them completely. No knot, no pile: the surface is flat and the fabric is the design. The weaver works from a painted cartoon placed under the warp, and works from the back.

Where two colours meet along a vertical, exactly the same problem arises as on a kilim: a slit. In tapestry these joins are sewn up from behind once the piece has come off the loom. It is the most reliable sign on the back of an Aubusson: rows of sewn slits, and the colour-change threads left hanging.

The Savonnerie: a pile knotted with the Savonnerie knot

A Savonnerie is woven on a high-warp loom, vertical, and it is knotted. The Savonnerie knot is the symmetric knot, the very one that is called the Turkish knot in oriental weaving, closed over two warp threads. The old warps are of linen or hemp, the pile is wool, sheared high and of perfect regularity.

The density stays moderate compared with a Persian workshop rug, in the order of 60,000 to 120,000 knots per square metre, and that is not the criterion: a Savonnerie is not judged on its fineness but on its design, executed from the cartoon of a professional designer working for the court and then for the State.

The repertoire of the two manufactories is European and architectural: symmetrical composition, a central rosette or medallion, acanthus scrolls, ribbons, garlands of roses, cornucopias, trompe-l'oeil framing. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century palette is pale — cream, pale pink, eau de nil, straw yellow; the great seventeenth-century pieces, by contrast, use dark grounds. No boteh, no gul, no tribal geometry, no endlessly repeated motif: nothing of what structures an oriental rug.

Telling the original from the reproduction

It has to be said without dodging: most of the rugs sold today as Aubusson are reproductions of the twentieth or twenty-first century, woven in China, India or Romania, either as tapestry or as needlepoint canvas. That is not a reproach aimed at those rugs, it is a piece of information.

• A needlepoint reproduction is recognised at once from the back: you see the grid of the canvas and embroidered stitches, not a weave.
• A woven reproduction shows a mechanical regularity, a colour strictly uniform from one edge to the other, and a modern cotton warp.
• An old piece carries uneven wear, variations of dye bath, earlier repairs, and colours that have moved differently according to their exposure.
• A jute or canvas backing applied at the factory, perfectly rectangular and with no trace of old stitching, points to a recent production.

What makes the value

An eighteenth-century Savonnerie or a documented Empire Aubusson are museum-level objects, which go through specialist salerooms and not through a neighbourhood workshop. Nineteenth-century Aubusson rugs in good condition have a real and steady decorative market. Recent reproductions have a decorative value, in line with how well they are made.

It is worth writing clearly: our rug buying concerns hand-knotted oriental rugs. On an Aubusson or a Savonnerie we can say what we see — the technique, the condition, what has been restored; the market for these pieces lies elsewhere and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

In the workshop: what can be done, what we refuse

On an Aubusson there is no pile, so no repiling. Restoration is a reweaving job done with a needle, weft by weft, together with taking up the joins that have opened. The fabric is thin and the wefts are fine: once open, a hole grows quickly. On a Savonnerie, by contrast, there is a pile, so repiling is possible and a well-managed repair can become almost invisible where the wool matches.

The most frequent problem is the backing. Many Aubussons were given a reinforcing cloth on the back at some point. Sewn on, it is taken off before any washing and put back afterwards. Glued on, that is another matter: the glue has soaked into the wefts, taking it off carries fibre away, and the honest answer is sometimes to leave it alone.

The pale palette is the fragile part. The greens, obtained by laying a plant yellow over indigo, turn blue as the yellow fades: it is the well-known phenomenon of the blue foliage in old tapestries. Madder and cochineal pinks fade to beige. These losses of colour are light damage, not dirt. A wash does not bring them back, and that has to be said beforehand, because many owners expect a cleaning to restore a colour that no longer exists. A colour repair can make up a locally faded area or a migration; it cannot make up twenty years of sun on a whole field.

Two other technical points. Iron-mordanted browns are corroded and brittle, on tapestry as on pile: they are the first areas to open. And the linen or hemp warps of an old Savonnerie become fragile with time: the ends give first, the last rows of weft come free, and that is where the work begins.

Finally, a weft-faced fabric holds a great deal of water and dries slowly. Drying flat, with air moving, under controlled tension, failing which the difference of shrinkage between warp and weft sets as rippling. On an eighteenth-century piece, or on a piece whose dyes are unstable, the honest option may be a dry treatment rather than a bath: we say so beforehand, and we do not cut down, do not back with latex and do not paint over wear.