10'9" x 14'9" Persian Kerman Rug | Ivory Field with Pastel Floral Medallion | 1950s

This is a mid-century Persian Kerman rug from the 1950s, woven in southeast Persia in the soft, painterly style that made Kerman the most collected floral weave of its period. The field is a milky ivory that reads almost like parchment in daylight, opened up around a small pale medallion and lightly scattered with rose and blue flower sprays. The proportions are true room-size at 10'9" x 14'9", which puts it squarely among oversize Persian rugs that can carry a full seating group with the furniture sitting on the rug rather than crowding the border. The wool is soft and still full-bodied after roughly 70 years, the sides and ends are sound, and the piece ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming origin, age and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing follows the classic Kerman formula of a quiet center and a busy frame. A small lobed medallion sits at the middle of the field, built from scrolling leafwork and tiny rosettes with a pendant finial dropping off each end. Around it the ivory ground is left largely empty, interrupted only by 6 loose bouquets of roses, forget-me-nots and buds arranged in mirrored pairs, plus a shaped cartouche of blossom work above and below the medallion. The field is contained by a scalloped outline that swells into deep corner spandrels packed with vine scroll and flowering branches. The main border is a wide rose-ground panel of palmettes, cypress-like sprays and small urns, separated from the field by an ivory floral guard and finished on the outside by a green meander stripe and a final ivory vine band. Nothing in the drawing is rigid; the flowers are shaded and naturalistic rather than stylized, which is exactly what separates a Kerman from the more geometric village weaves.

A Palette of Ivory, Rose and Pastel Blue

Color is the reason this rug exists. The ground is a warm ivory with a faint cream and oatmeal tone that shifts with the light, and every other color is pitched a few steps below full strength. The medallion works in pale turquoise and soft blue-green over a dusty mauve outline, with small cream and sage accents in the center. The flower sprays carry the strongest notes in the rug: raspberry and old rose petals, sky blue and cornflower buds, and olive to sage green leafwork, all of it kept small so the field stays open. The main border shifts to a muted rose and salmon ground that leans almost apricot in daylight, filled with turquoise and teal flowerheads. Green appears twice in the outer bands, once as a soft seafoam meander and once as a deeper moss outline. There is no black, no navy and no hard red anywhere, which is why this palette settles so easily into pale plaster walls, oak floors, linen upholstery and warm metals.

Kerman Weaving in Southeast Persia

Kerman sits in the high desert of southeast Persia and has been a court-quality weaving center since the Safavid era, with the finest work historically associated with the nearby town of Ravar. The city's weavers work from full-color cartoons drawn by professional designers, which is how a medallion this curvilinear and a border this shaded can be reproduced accurately across almost 15 feet of length. Construction is the standard Kerman recipe: a cotton warp and weft, an asymmetric knot, and a clipped wool pile tight enough to hold fine outlines while still feeling soft underfoot. Kerman wool takes vegetal and early synthetic dyes into these low-saturation pastels better than most Persian wool, and the 1950s were the peak decade for exactly this ivory-ground, open-field look sent to American and European homes. If you want to understand how weave structure, dye behavior and wear patterns place a piece like this in its decade, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same signals we used here.