10' x 13'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Tree of Tabriz Design | 1960s Semi-Antique Ivory Field

This 10' x 13'7" Tabriz was woven in the 1960s in the classic Tree of Tabriz manner, with slender brown branches climbing out of the lower border and breaking into blossom across an open ivory ground. It is a large room-size piece that reads light rather than heavy, which is unusual for a rug of this scale and makes it easy to live with. The wool pile is full and even, the drawing is tight and confident, and the colours have the softened, slightly honeyed quality that only comes with sixty years of settling. If you want help placing a piece like this in the right decade, our guide on how to date an oriental rug walks through the same clues we used here. Every rug we sell, this one included, ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field carries no medallion at all. Instead the weaver built a mirrored tree and vine composition, one half answering the other across the long central axis, so the eye travels up the rug rather than settling in the middle. Thin woody branches arc and fork, carrying split palmettes, fan-shaped carnations, 8 petal rosettes, small cypress and vase forms, bud clusters and serrated leaves, with tiny four-petal flowers filling the ground between them. Because it is drawn as a true all over rug pattern, furniture can sit anywhere on it without cutting off a focal point. The border system is deep and layered: a wide red main band of lobed cartouches and blossoming vine, flanked by gold-olive floral stripes, a narrow pink and navy vine, and an outer ivory guard stripe filled with a crisp navy star-and-cross lattice that frames the whole piece like inlay.

A Closer Look at the Colors

Ivory is the main colour and it stays open and luminous across the whole field, warming to a soft cream and pale wheat where the light catches the pile. Against it the weaver worked a full palette: deep madder red in the main border and in the smaller blossoms, inky navy blue for outlines, leaf veins and the star guard stripe, a mellow gold that turns almost olive in the inner bands, and a clear light blue that lifts individual carnations and palmette hearts off the ground. Green appears in the leaves and in the small rosette centres, with touches of soft pink, salmon and aubergine scattered through the flower heads. The branches themselves are a warm coffee brown. The corner and pile close-ups show how many of these tones are single-knot accents rather than large blocks of colour, which is why the rug looks painterly from a standing height and reveals far more detail when you kneel down to it.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's most commercially serious weaving city for centuries, the place where designers, dyers and workshop weavers all worked to a written drawing rather than from memory. Fineness there is measured in Raj, knots per gereh across the width, and a floral tree design like this one simply cannot be drawn with curved, flowing branches unless the knot count is high enough to carry the line. You can see it in the photographs: the vines turn smoothly, the border cartouches close cleanly at the corners, and the star lattice in the outer guard stripe stays perfectly regular over nearly 14 feet of length. The pile is good Azerbaijani wool, still dense underfoot, on a cotton foundation that keeps a rug this wide lying flat. For buyers shopping the scale rather than the style, it belongs with our other 10x14 Persian rugs, but few of those are drawn with this much restraint on an ivory ground.