From the Oriental rug to the artist's rug

In the fifth century before our era, in the Altai mountains, someone knotted a wool rug fine enough to count some 360,000 knots per square metre. This rug, found at the end of the 1940s, already says the essential: the Oriental rug is a technique before it is a style, and this technique has always served a drawing. In the great workshops of Persia, an artist drew the motif on paper and a weaver executed it on the loom. The contemporary artist's rug extends this division of roles: a painter, an engraver or a designer gives the drawing, a workshop knots or tufts it, and a publisher makes the link between the two. From the Persian court rug to the collections of the house, by way of the commissions of Louis XIV and the painters' rugs of the interwar years, the thread has never broken.

The oldest known rug was already hand-knotted

The Pazyryk carpet is the oldest known knotted-pile rug. The Russian archaeologist Sergei Rudenko discovered it with his team at the end of the 1940s, in a Scythian burial mound in the Pazyryk region, in the Siberian Altai. It measures about 183 by 200 centimetres, it is dated to the fifth century before our era and it is kept at the Hermitage Museum, in Saint Petersburg. Its origin remains debated: some attribute it to ancient Armenia, others to Persia.

What is striking is its density, higher than that of most rugs today. The gesture was therefore mastered well before history kept written traces of it. It was then handed down from Anatolia to Iran, from the Caucasus to Central Asia, with two great families of knots: the symmetrical knot, known as Turkish, which encircles two warp threads, and the asymmetrical knot, known as Persian, which wraps around one alone and rests on the next.

Nomads made the rug their home. They first laid it on the ground to protect themselves from the cold and the earth, then they inscribed upon it their signs, their motifs, their belonging. The Oriental rug was born of this use, and that is also why it is read with the senses as much as with the eyes.

In the court workshops, an artist already drew the cartoon

The figure of the artist who draws for the rug is an old one. In the workshops of the Persian courts, the motif was traced on paper by an artist, in the form of a cartoon, then entrusted to a weaver who knotted it on the loom; the two crafts were held by different people. In villages and encampments, by contrast, the drawing passed from hand to hand and was handed down from memory.

From this double origin were born geographical signatures. Isfahan, Tabriz, Herat, Bukhara: each city had its knots, its wools, its palettes. Tabriz, its florals of great fineness; the plateaus of Anatolia, their nomadic geometries. Sandrine Demas learned to recognise these handwritings before founding the house, to the point of no longer hearing the name of an Iranian city without thinking of a motif. When these cities are mentioned to her in the news, she replies: “I see drawings.”

For a lover of line and geometry, this history recalls a simple thing: in a rug, the drawing has always been a decision, taken by someone, then held by another.

When France wished to knot in its turn

In the seventeenth century, France learned to knot in its turn. The Savonnerie manufactory wove pile rugs from the middle of the century, and Louis XIV made it the instrument of an extraordinary commission.

With his minister Colbert, the king commissioned for the Grande Galerie of the Louvre ninety-two monumental rugs, intended to cover the 442 metres of the gallery. The king's painter, Charles Le Brun, imagined their motifs, and the rugs were woven between 1668 and 1688, in symmetrical knot. Workshops were built in Paris for the undertaking, and the looms, beyond any usual measure, were cut from wood intended for warships; among the apprentice weavers were orphans and very young children. The work lasted some twenty years. Louis XIV finally settled at Versailles and did not use them as planned: some were given as diplomatic gifts, many were sold after the Revolution. Several were unrolled side by side in June 1919, for the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The Manufactures nationales keep forty-one of them today.

From 1 to 8 February 2026, some thirty of these rugs were unfurled in the nave of the Grand Palais, in Paris. The founder of Diacasan saw the exhibition. She draws a lesson from it: even the Savonnerie owes its technique to the Orient. A rug conceived by a court painter and knotted in France remains an Oriental rug by its gesture.

Painters for the floor, between the two wars

The artist's rug as we understand it today took shape in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. One woman played a decisive role there: Marie Cuttoli.

In 1925, she opened on the rue Vignon, in Paris, a house and a shop named Myrbor. Her weaving workshops were in Algeria, and she asked painters to draw rugs: Jean Lurçat, Fernand Léger, Louis Marcoussis, then Jean Arp, Pierre Chareau, Pablo Picasso or Joan Miró. Under this name, she had made and sold only artists' rugs, distributed among a small circle of connoisseurs. The same movement would later lead the Aubusson workshops towards avant-garde painting, for tapestry. In the 1930s, the rug became an author's piece in its own right: in 1935, the rugs of the liner Normandie were entrusted to the Cogolin workshops, and the decorator Paule Leleu signed her rugs from 1937.

The principle was set: an artist who is not a weaver gives a drawing, a workshop translates it into wool, and someone brings the two together and answers for it. It is already, almost word for word, the craft of the publisher.

From the dune of rugs to the publishing house

The path of Diacasan begins with the Orient. Sandrine's father worked in rugs: “he initiated me into this world very early”. She remembers the pieces that arrived in bulk for an exhibition: “The rugs, delivered in bulk, formed something like a dune.” They had to be sorted, labelled, folded, touched one by one. It was there that she learned to read a rug with her hands before reading it with her eyes: what a wool says under the palm, and what a drawing tells of the city that saw it born. This school has not changed its method since.

During the 1980s, she saw the contemporary rug emerge, drawn by artists and designers. In 2000, she chose to make it a craft in its own right and founded a publishing house: choosing artists, finding for each the right workshop and material, signing the pieces. The artistic director does not draw. She keeps from the Orient a standard for wool, gesture and duration, and the instinct that recognises a workshop that works well, in Nepal as in India. The relationship with these workshops has lasted twenty-five years. The craft itself is described in what is a rug publisher.

What the artist's rug keeps from the Orient

It keeps the gesture, the material and the taste for the right drawing; it changes the author of the motif and the scale of the original work.

With Renaud Allirand, small-format engravings on paper become wool rugs hand-knotted in Nepal: this is the SUR LE FIL collection, where the rows of knots take the place of the furrows of the plate. With Christian Signorel, Antiquity returns to the floor. BESTIAIRE starts from an octopus seen in a mosaic at Pompeii, and the very shape of the rugs is inspired by Greco-Roman cameos and Egyptian cartouches: the outline of the piece is part of the drawing, like the frame of a Persian cartoon. His geometries for MINOTOR, hand-tufted in India, extend the tradition of Anatolian motifs without quoting them: lines, curves and structures that hold the whole piece.

Other artists have left the figure. The photographer Emmanuel Thibault seeks in SPATIAL a mineral and vegetal world, where texture becomes the subject; his rugs are hand-knotted in Nepal, with Himalayan wool. One finds there, in another form, what village rugs already did: a surface read up close, by touch, as much as from afar.

The most direct link with the Orient remains Nepalese knotting. The NEPALESE RUGS collection, at once contemporary and classical, takes the craftsmanship of the workshop as its only motif. Why Nepal holds this role today is explained in Nepal, the Oriental rug of today, and the method that brings a drawing down to the floor in what the drawing does not say.

The Pazyryk carpet measures barely two metres a side. It has crossed nearly twenty-five centuries.

Text written by the house of Diacasan Edition from conversations with Sandrine Demas on the genesis of the house and on material, our collection records and the historical sources cited, October 2026.

Sources: Wikipedia, Oriental rug; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, A King's Carpet; Sortir à Paris, Le Trésor retrouvé du Roi Soleil au Grand Palais; Hyperallergic, Marie Cuttoli; Encyclopædia Universalis, le tapis dans les années 1930.