10' x 13'4" Persian Mashad Rug | Red Floral Medallion | Woven Cartouche Signature | Excellent Condition

This is a full room size piece from Khorasan, a hand-knotted wool floor rug measuring 10' x 13'4" with a deep red field, an ivory and navy layered medallion and a small woven cartouche set into the upper guard border. The pile is a firm 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, and the wool still carries the slightly waxy sheen that good Khorasan fleece keeps for decades. Condition is excellent with even pile from end to end, straight sides and clean white fringe. Among 10x13 Persian rugs this is the size that finally covers a large seating group or a 10 seat table without looking borrowed from a smaller room. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity listing origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is the classic Mashad workshop formula worked out at full scale. A round central medallion sits inside a navy cusped surround, and at its heart is a gold and rust rosette ringed by small blossoms, with slender pendants reaching north and south into the field. Four navy spandrels close the corners and repeat the same vocabulary in miniature. Across the open red ground the weaver has laid an allover arrangement of palmettes, split leaves, curling arabesque vines and small feathery lancet leaves, all of it drawn with the curved line that separates a city workshop from village work. The main border is a navy band of large boteh and palmette cartouches linked by rose and gold vinework, framed on both sides by ivory guard stripes carrying a running flower and leaf meander. Along the top guard border sits a small ivory cartouche holding woven script, the workshop mark that identifies the piece as a named shop production rather than an anonymous commercial weave.

The Red, Ivory and Navy Palette

The field is a true madder red, warm and slightly blue-leaning rather than orange, and it holds that tone consistently across all 13'4" of length. Against it the navy of the medallion surround, spandrels and main border reads almost black in low light and opens into a clear indigo where the sun hits it, which is exactly what a naturally dyed wool should do. Ivory does the structural work here: the guard stripes, the outlines around every palmette and the highlights inside the medallion all use it, and that thin white line is what keeps a busy field legible from across a room. Inside the pattern there are quieter accents worth noticing, a soft rose that appears in the border flowerheads, an old gold in the leaves, a pale sky blue in the smallest blossoms and a burnt rust that shows up in the medallion center and again in the corner spandrels. The narrow red outer band and red selvage frame the whole composition and tie it back to the field.

Mashad Weaving in Khorasan

Mashad is the great city of Khorasan in northeast Persia, a pilgrimage center whose workshops have supplied large formal floor coverings for well over a century. The looms there specialize in exactly this kind of piece: generous room sizes, a strong central medallion, dense floral fill and a heavy, resilient wool pile that tolerates a dining table and chairs for generations. A signed cartouche in Mashad means a workshop piece, woven under a master's name and held to his standard of drawing and finishing, and you can see that discipline here in the symmetry of the medallion, the way the border turns the corners without crowding and the even, tightly packed knotting visible on the reverse. If you want the background on the city, its master weavers and how to judge one, our guide to Persian Mashad rugs covers it in detail.