10'2" x 13' Persian Tabriz Rug | Signed All-Over Floral | Ivory Field, Excellent Condition

Signed by its weaver in a woven cartouche set into the border, this 10'2" x 13' Persian Tabriz comes out of northwest Persia with a 3/8" wool pile knotted on a cotton foundation. The ivory ground carries an all-over floral drawing from selvedge to selvedge, with no medallion to anchor it, and the wide ivory main border repeats the same flower vocabulary at a larger scale so the whole piece reads as one continuous garden. Among 10x13 Persian rugs this is the kind of pale, light-handed ground that is genuinely hard to find at room size, since most large Persian weaving leans red or navy. Condition is excellent, the pile is full across the field and in the border, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a classic Tabriz all-over floral composition built on a lattice of thin vines that loop and cross without ever closing into a panel. Along the vines sit Shah Abbasi palmettes, 8 petal rosettes in blue and red, small star flowers, tulip-like buds and large curled acanthus leaves that spiral back on themselves, a drawing habit Tabriz workshops are known for. Look closely at the close-up photograph and you will see the repeat is mirrored rather than stamped: each flower head is drawn slightly differently, with outlines in dark brown and inner shading in 2 or 3 tones. The border system runs 5 bands deep on each side, a broad main border of alternating palmettes and leaf-filled cartouches flanked by narrow floral guard stripes and a fine twin-line inner stripe, and all 4 corners are resolved cleanly so the pattern turns rather than breaks.

Color Palette

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to white, and it is the reason this rug lightens a room instead of weighting it. Against that ground the weaver worked a cool mid blue for the rosettes and leaf tips, a clear tomato red and a deeper brick red for the palmettes and small flower heads, soft gold for the scrolling vines, a muted sage green in the foliage and dark brown to near black for the outlines that hold each motif in place. Touches of dusty rose and pale sky blue in the border keep the frame from going heavier than the field. The overall effect is polychrome but quiet, since every bright note is small and surrounded by ivory, which is what separates this piece from the saturated red-ground pieces that dominate ivory Persian rugs shoppers usually have to choose between.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the most organized weaving city in the country for generations, working from full cartoons with a master at the loom, which is why its curved vine work holds its line across a piece this large. Tabriz fineness is counted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches of width, and the discipline that system imposes shows in the back photograph here: straight, evenly packed rows of knots on a cotton foundation, with no drift in the pattern from one end of the 13' length to the other. The woven cartouche in the border marks this as a workshop piece rather than anonymous village production, since a weaver only signs work he expects to be judged. The 3/8" wool pile is dense underfoot and still stands upright, so the rug reads as a piece that was cared for rather than walked flat.