Vintage Hand-Knotted Rug BB6261 8'7" × 9'6" $20,000

A machine woven wool rug designed by Frank Brangwyn and manufactured by James Templeton & Co, Glasgow, Scotland, in 1930.

Sir Frank William Brangwyn (1867 Bruges, Belgium – 1956 Ditchling, Sussex, England) was a polymath, an artist-craftsman who created murals, oils and watercolors, furniture, textiles, ceramics, stained glass and prints.

Brangwyn was commissioned by Pollard & Co., London, to design the fixtures and fittings for two bedrooms, a sitting room and a dining room for their 1930 exhibition of modern furnishings. This rug, or a version of it, was part of that exhibition which makes it a valuable collector piece. Brangwyn and Templeton’s mutual interest was to combine the “Fine Arts” with the “Industrial Arts” to create what they described as “Art in Industry”. Moreover, at least one of the rugs they made together for the Pollard & Co exhibition survives to this day in the Textile Collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. The museum’s on-line catalogue notes that the carpet has a “Pink-beige ground with a pattern of stylised floral and foliate motifs in pastel shades of pink, yellow, green, blue, purple, white and brown.”

The rug bears the artist’s woven initials at two ends: FB.