10'11" x 14'6" Persian Tabriz Rug | All-Over Floral Field | Ivory Lion Border

This 10'11" x 14'6" Persian Tabriz is a full formal room piece, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" pile that still stands upright and even across all 158 square feet. The brick red field carries an all-over floral drawing rather than a central medallion, which is the harder of the two layouts to weave well because the repeat has to stay true over 14 feet of length without the eye catching a seam in the pattern. It reads as one of those oversize Persian rugs that anchors a dining table with all the chairs pulled out, or fills a great room wall to wall. Condition is excellent, the ends and sides are sound, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over floral design built on a lattice of thin curving vines that cross and recross the ground, tying together large lobed palmettes, serrated saz leaves, 8 petal rosettes and small cypress and vase forms. Look closely at the detail shots and you will find tiny paired birds and curling cloud bands tucked between the blossoms, a drawing habit that belongs to the better workshop cartoons. Two narrow guard stripes in pale blue frame the field with a running chain of small squares and dots. The wide ivory main border is the showpiece: a lattice of miniature diamonds in blue and red, interrupted at intervals by round rosette cartouches and by figural lion-like animals facing inward, a motif drawn from the old hunting and garden repertoire. The corners resolve cleanly, which on a rug this long is the clearest tell of a well-managed cartoon.

A Brick Red Field Cooled by Ivory and Pale Blue

The ground is a saturated brick red with enough depth in the dye to shift between a wine tone and a warmer terracotta as you walk around it, which is normal abrash behavior in good vegetal-toned wool. Against it the ornament is deliberately cool: soft ivory and cream for the palmette outlines, pale sky blue and slate for the leaf bodies and the guard stripes, and a strong navy reserved for the smallest accents at the center of each rosette. Sage and olive green carry the vine work, with dusty rose and pale apricot lighting up the flower heads. The ivory main border drops the value right down and gives the eye a place to rest, which is what keeps 158 square feet of red from feeling heavy. In a room with warm wood floors the red reads rich and traditional; against grey stone or a pale rug pad it leans cooler and more formal.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the city that supplied cartoons, master designers and trained weavers to half the country. Tabriz workshops measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches, and they built their reputation on curvilinear drawing: flowing vine, accurate curve, borders that turn the corner without a fudge. This piece is squarely in that tradition, woven on a cotton warp and weft with a clipped 3/8" wool pile that holds detail sharply while still giving a room-size rug the body it needs to lie flat and take traffic. The wool has the dry, slightly crisp handle typical of the region, and the back shows an even, disciplined knot line from selvage to selvage.