10'3" x 13'6" Antique Persian Sarouk Rug | All Over Floral Red Field | Circa 1930s

This is a full room size antique Persian Sarouk rug from the 1930s, hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and still carrying the weight, body and glossy handle that made Sarouk the most sought after Persian weave of its era. At 10'3" x 13'6" it covers a genuine 12 seat dining setup or a large formal living room without crowding the walls, and it is one of the more useful of the 10x13 Persian rugs we keep in stock. The pile is even from end to end, the ends and sides are original and sound, and the drawing has stayed crisp after roughly 90 years on the floor. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, age, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field carries the classic Sarouk all over floral composition: detached sprays, curved vines and small bouquets floating on open red ground, arranged in mirrored groups that read as loose lobed cartouches rather than a rigid lattice. Look closely at the close up photograph and you can pick out footed vases, 8 petal rosettes, serrated leaves and tiny tulip heads, each one outlined in near black and filled with camel gold, olive and apricot. The main border is a wide navy band of turning palmettes and leafy scroll, framed on both sides by salmon guard stripes carrying a running vine of small flowers. The corners resolve cleanly, which is a mark of a drawn cartoon rather than a copied one, and the 4 corners of the field are each anchored by a large angled spray that pulls the eye outward across the full 13'6" length.

The Color: Deep Madder Red With Navy and Salmon

The field is a deep saturated red, closer to ripe raspberry in shade and to tomato red where the light catches the wool, with the soft natural variation across the width that only vegetable dyed antique wool gives. Against that ground the drawing works in a very dark indigo that reads almost black at a distance, lifted by camel gold, mustard, olive green, apricot and small touches of ivory in the flower heads. The main border is a true navy blue, dense enough to hold the red field in place, while the guard stripes shift to a warm salmon rose that also appears in the border palmettes and in the small blossoms along the inner stripe. The back, visible in the final photograph, shows the same palette in gentler tones: faded rose, olive and blue over pale cotton warps, which is exactly what a 1930s piece should look like from underneath.

Sarouk: Weaving in the Arak Valley

Sarouk is a village north of Arak in west central Persia, and in the 1920s and 1930s its looms, along with those of the surrounding villages, produced the heavy floral room size rugs that filled American homes between the wars. The recipe was consistent: tough local wool spun for body, a cotton foundation packed tight, a thick pile clipped medium high, and a floral cartoon drawn freehand by the master weaver. That construction is why so many of these rugs are still in daily service, and the ruler photograph gives you an honest look at the knot count and the straight, even rows behind the pile. If you want to understand how weavers, dealers and collectors place a rug like this in time, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same signals we used on this piece: dye behavior, wear pattern, cotton color and the drawing style of the border.