10'1" x 16'11" Persian Isfahan Rug | Red Floral Medallion Field | Signed Workshop Cartouche

At 10'1" x 16'11" this is a true palace length piece, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile and still in excellent condition. It is a classic Persian Isfahan rug in the central medallion format, and the end border carries a woven signature cartouche, which tells you a named workshop stood behind the loom rather than an anonymous village weaver. Rugs of this length in this level of drawing surface rarely, and buyers shopping oversize Persian rugs usually wait a long time for one that is both this long and this finely drawn. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an ivory pendant medallion built around an 8 petal rosette, floated on a navy ground and ringed by palmettes, lotus heads and small serrated leaves. From there the field runs edge to edge in a continuous arabesque vine scroll, every stem curving into the next and carrying blossoms, rosettes and cloud band leaves in a balanced repeat that mirrors across both axes. Ivory spandrels fill the 4 corners of the field with the same vocabulary drawn at a smaller scale. The main border is a wide navy band of alternating palmettes and rosettes linked by a thin meandering vine, and it is flanked on both sides by several ivory and blue guard stripes that step the eye out to the selvage. The drawing stays disciplined over 16 feet of length, with no drift in the vine spacing, which is the hardest thing to hold on a rug this size.

Color Palette

The field is a deep madder red with a slight blue cast, warm rather than orange, and it reads as one solid ground from across the room even though the vine work covers almost all of it. Blue appears in at least 3 clear values: a near black navy in the main border and the medallion ground, a mid denim blue in the leaves and secondary blossoms, and a lighter sky blue used for outlines and for the narrow bands between borders. Against those, ivory and cream do the structural work in the spandrels, the guard stripes and the medallion core, with camel and soft gold filling the outer border ground. Smaller accents of rose, brick and a muted olive green sit inside the individual flower heads. The back photograph shows the same palette carried clean through to the knot, with no fading between face and foundation.

Isfahan Origin and Weaving Quality

Isfahan sits in central Persia and has been a weaving capital since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. The reputation of Persian Isfahan rugs rests on drawing above everything else: the curved line, the flowing vine, the precision of a palmette repeated hundreds of times without wobble. That kind of drawing only survives at a high knot count, which is why Isfahan weavers work fine and slow. The signature cartouche woven into the end border is part of that tradition, since Isfahan workshops sign their work the way a studio signs a painting. On a rug 16'11" long, a workshop was committing a loom and a team to years of work, and the evenness of the pile, the straight sides and the crisp border repeat all point back to that discipline.