10'4" x 13'7" Persian Kashmar Rug | Navy Blue Vase Medallion | Signed Cartouche

A signed piece is a workshop piece, and this one says so twice: once in the drawing, which is far more controlled than ordinary village work, and once in the small ivory cartouche woven into the copper border. The field is deep navy blue, the pile is a full 3/8" of Khorasan wool on a cotton foundation, and the condition is excellent throughout with no wear, no repair and clean selvages. At 10'4" x 13'7" it covers a room properly rather than floating in it, which puts it squarely among 10x14 Persian rugs bought for a main living space or a long dining table. Every rug we ship leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed pale blue medallion built around a single footed vase, its mouth spilling carnations and rosettes, with 4 ivory arabesque leaves curling away from the cartouche to fill the remaining ground. Above and below, slender pendants extend into the navy field, which is not left open for a moment: a dense lattice of curved vines carries large serrated boteh, cloud bands, palmettes and small white and red blossoms out to the stepped corner spandrels. The main border reverses the scheme, running salmon and copper under a procession of paisley boteh alternating with vase cartouches and rounded medallions, all separated by fine blue and ivory guard stripes and finished with a dark navy meander at the outer edge. It is a curvilinear drawing carried through at scale, with the 4 corners resolved cleanly instead of being cut off mid motif.

A Navy Field Framed in Salmon and Copper

The field reads as a near black indigo in low light and opens into a true midnight navy in daylight, which is what makes the rest of the palette work. Against it the border glows in salmon and warm copper, a soft terracotta tone that has aged into the wool rather than sitting on top of it, while the medallion answers in a chalky powder blue. Detail work is drawn in ivory and cream for the scrollwork, brick red for the rosette centers, muted olive and soft green in the leaves, and a steel blue in the border vases and guard bands. There is no harsh contrast anywhere: warm and cool tones trade places across the surface, so the rug settles easily with walnut and mahogany furniture, brass, and off white or oatmeal walls.

Kashmar Weaving in Khorasan

Kashmar sits in Khorasan in northeastern Persia, southwest of the great weaving city that produces Persian Mashad rugs, and it works in the same regional tradition: long staple Khorasan wool, cotton warp and weft, the asymmetric knot, and a taste for large formal medallion and pictorial layouts. Kashmar workshops built their name on drawing that stays crisp over big surfaces, and that is exactly what you get here, with the vine scroll holding its curve across 13'7" of length without wobbling. The 3/8" pile is even from end to end, the wool has the dry lanolin sheen that only good highland fleece develops, and the signed cartouche tells you a named workshop stood behind the loom rather than an anonymous commercial run.