10'3" x 12'7" Persian Mashad Rug | Rust Red Field, Blue Floral Medallion | Excellent Condition

This is a room size piece from Khorasan in the classic city format: a wide, quiet field of warm rust red carrying a single blue and rose medallion, held inside three floral borders that do all the talking at the edges. The wool pile is clipped at 3/8", low enough to keep the drawing crisp and heavy enough to feel substantial underfoot, and the reverse shows an even, disciplined knot line across the full 10'3" x 12'7" width. It belongs to the workshop tradition covered in our guide to Persian Mashad rugs, and it arrives in excellent condition with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the disciplined city format Mashad weavers built their reputation on: one diamond medallion set dead center, a long pendant rising and falling from each point, and a broad open field left deliberately plain so the eye travels to the drawing rather than fighting it. Inside the medallion are cupped blue palmettes, small rose blossoms and a tight rosette at the core, all wrapped in fine curling vine work that never breaks the outline. The 4 corner spandrels answer the medallion with scrolling acanthus leaves and ivory cartouche flowers, their outer edges cut in soft serrated curves rather than hard steps. The border system runs 3 bands deep: a wide main border of alternating rose and cobalt palmettes on a near-black ground, flanked by two narrower guard bands of linked rosettes, with a fine reciprocal ivory stripe finishing the outer edge and the selvage. Every repeat is drawn by hand rather than stamped, so the flowers shift slightly from one to the next, which is exactly what separates a workshop piece from a printed imitation.

A Warm Rust Red Field With Blue, Ivory and Olive

The field is a warm rust red with a faint madder glow, deeper toward the border and slightly lighter where the light catches the pile, the natural abrash of a wool dyed in batches. Against it the medallion works in two distinct blues: a bright cobalt on the outer cupped petals and a dark near-navy in the recessed spaces, with rose pink blossoms and a small brick red heart keeping the center from reading cold. Ivory does the precision work, outlining leaf tips, filling the corner cartouche flowers and drawing the thin reciprocal line at the outer edge, so every motif has a clean boundary. Olive and a muted sea green run through the vine scrolls and the main border ground, cooling the red and giving the palmettes something to sit against. The overall reading in daylight is a warm, saturated red room with blue jewelry on top, and it sits comfortably with dark walnut floors, brass, and cream or oatmeal walls.

Mashad, Khorasan and the Weaving Quality

Mashad sits in Khorasan in the far northeast of Persia, a pilgrimage city whose workshops have supplied large, formal floor pieces for well over a century, drawing on local Khorasan wool that takes red dyes with unusual depth. The weave here is the asymmetric Persian knot on a cotton foundation, packed evenly enough that the back reads as a clean grid with no pulled rows or wandering wefts, which is the practical reason a Mashad of this class holds its shape at over 10 feet wide instead of drawing in at the waist. The wool has a natural sheen that comes up as you walk around the piece, so the field shifts between a lighter and a deeper red depending on where you stand. In excellent condition with full even pile, intact ends and tight original selvages, this is a piece bought once and kept.