10'2" x 13' Persian Kashmar Rug | Signed Vase & Bird Pictorial Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a signed Persian Kashmar in a room-filling 10'2" x 13', hand-knotted with a 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation and finished with a weaver's cartouche at the top of the field. What sets it apart from a standard medallion piece is how much is actually drawn into the field: footed vases, ewers, perched birds, small animals and cypress forms are scattered through the blue ground rather than repeated as a flat pattern, so the rug rewards a second and third look. The scale places it squarely with the 10x13 Persian rugs that anchor a full seating group without crowding the walls. It is in excellent condition with even pile throughout, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The composition is built around a small ivory medallion with an 8 petal rosette at its center, framed by a rust red lobed cartouche and then by a pale blue shield that radiates outward into the field. Pendants run north and south from the medallion into matching ivory and burgundy palmettes at the top and bottom of the field, and the 4 corners carry heavy ivory spandrels filled with paisley boteh, curling vine and split leaf. Inside the field, dozens of individually drawn vessels sit among the scrollwork: tall urns, lidded ewers, low bowls and handled vases, several with birds and small quadrupeds tucked between them. The main border abandons the usual repeating rosette band in favor of a large scale ivory and burgundy paisley cartouche pattern, with a green crowned vase interrupting the border at the center of each end, and the signature cartouche sits inside one of those green vases. A narrow blue outer guard band closes the drawing cleanly on all sides.

A Two-Tone Blue Field With Burgundy and Ivory

Color is what carries this rug across a big room. The field works in two registers of blue: a deep royal blue at the outer edges of the ground and a lighter, chalkier sky blue that opens up around the medallion, which gives the center a lift you rarely see in a single-ground Persian rug. Against that, the medallion core and the border pattern come forward in burgundy and rust red, cooled by broad ivory and cream passages in the spandrels and the paisley cartouches. The smaller motifs supply the accents: bottle green in the crowned vases and leafwork, soft gold and camel in the vine and border filler, touches of rose, teal and dusty lavender in the flower heads and bird detail. The outer guard is a clear medium blue that repeats the field and keeps the whole piece reading blue from across the room, while the ivory holds the drawing legible under lamplight.

Kashmar Weaving in Khorasan

Kashmar is a weaving town in Khorasan, the northeastern province of Persia, working within the same tradition as the Persian Mashad rugs woven to its north. The region is known for long, lustrous Khorasan wool and for pictorial drawing, which is exactly what this piece trades on: a curved-line cartoon with figurative vases and birds demands a weaver who can follow a detailed design rather than a memorized repeat. The back, shown against a ruler, reads as a tight, regular hand-knotted weave with clean row definition and no machine uniformity, and the 3/8" pile is heavy enough for daily traffic while still holding the fine outlines. The woven signature in the cartouche marks it as workshop work rather than an anonymous village piece, and a signed Kashmar of this size and condition is a genuinely uncommon find.