10'7" x 14'6" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory All Over Floral Field | Fine Weave

At 10'7" x 14'6" this Tabriz is built to carry a whole formal room rather than sit as an island in the middle of it, and it is one of the more disciplined pieces in our group of oversize Persian rugs. The ground is a warm ivory, worked edge to edge with a repeating garden of palmettes, rosettes and hair-thin vine scroll, and the drawing holds its accuracy right into the corners where lesser weavings usually crowd or improvise. The wool pile sits low and even on a cotton foundation, the fringe and selvages are clean and original, and the back reads sharp enough that the pattern is legible from the reverse. Condition is excellent, with no repairs, no fade lines and no low areas. Every rug we ship leaves with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion here. This is a true all over floral design, a lattice of slender stems that rise in mirrored pairs and carry large round rosettes, split palmettes, serrated saz leaves and small cypress-like sprays. The rosettes are the anchors: broad discs of 12 to 16 petals, each one given a different core color so the eye keeps moving across the field instead of locking onto a center. Between them sit smaller five petal blossoms, buds and curling tendrils that fill every open inch of ivory without turning muddy. The border system runs 7 bands deep, with a broad camel main border of paired palmettes and vertical flowering stems, flanked by sage green guard stripes of little rose and ivory blossoms, and closed on the outside by a saw-tooth row of dark leaf points. Corner resolution in the main border is handled properly, with the palmette turning the angle instead of being cut off.

The Ivory, Camel and Sage Palette

The field reads as a soft buttered ivory, closer to cream than to stark white, and it takes a golden cast under warm light which is why this piece photographs so differently from most ivory and beige Persian rugs. Against that ground the weaver used a restrained but wide palette: dusty rose and old burgundy in the rosette petals, deep forest and teal green in the leaf work, mid navy and sky blue in the small blossoms, and touches of brown, olive and soft gold in the palmette centers. The main border shifts to camel, a shade or two darker and warmer than the field, which gives the rug a visible frame without a hard color break. The sage green guard bands are the quiet surprise, cooling the whole composition and keeping the reds from reading orange. Nothing in the palette is loud, so the rug settles under existing furniture rather than fighting it.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's design capital for centuries, the place where court cartoons were drawn and where the curved line was mastered. Persian Tabriz rugs are woven on a vertical loom with a hook, which lets a workshop hold a very fine, very regular knot across a piece this wide, and it shows in the field of this rug: the vine scroll never wobbles, the rosettes stay circular, and both selvages run dead straight over 14'6". A weaving of this width takes a team working side by side for a long stretch, and the consistency of the ivory ground across the full span tells you the wool was dyed in one lot and managed carefully. The pile is fine wool, dense and tightly packed on a cotton warp and weft, which is why the back photographs so crisply and why a rug like this takes decades of real use in a living or dining room without losing its drawing.