The design of this carpet appears to date from the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century. The loosely scrolling arabesques, the perching parrots and the grotesque masks all relate closely to the tapestries designed or influenced by Jean Bérain (1637-1711). The grotesque tapestries with a yellow ground whose cartoons were designed by Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer (1634-1699) using motifs of Bérain's (C. J. Adelson, European Tapestry in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, New York, 1994, no. 18, pp. 307-321 and E. A. Standen, European Post-Medieval Tapestries and Related Hangings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985, II, pp. 441-458) display all of these features. The design of the present carpet has a less regimented structure than the Bérain/Monnoyer tapestries, lacking the rectilinear components provided by the strapwork, but is otherwise very close. The drawing of the flowers can also be closely related to other tapestry-woven products of Beauvais at this period. Both the densely worked floral sprays issuing from the vases in the main field and the loosely scrolling fronds and tendrils in the border are similar to designs found on a chair back made in Beauvais for the Swedish Chancellor, Count Carl Piper, in 1696 (E. A. Standen, op. cit., II, pp. 459-460)

The present carpet is remarkable in that it appears that there is no record of any flatwoven carpets of this size, made for use on the floor rather than as table-carpets, woven in France before the workshops at Aubusson began to weave carpets in this fashion in around 1767 (M. Jarry, The Carpets of Aubusson, Leigh-on-Sea, 1969, p. 20). Beauvais is also known to have produced tapestry-woven floor-carpets, but again only towards the end of the eighteenth century. The present carpet demonstrates that this tradition has a far longer history than previously documented