10' x 13' Persian Mashad Rug | Signed Border Cartouche | Navy Medallion on Burgundy | 1980s

A signed workshop piece from the 1980s, this 10' x 13' Persian Mashad carries a small cartouche woven into the upper border, the weaver's own mark and the first thing an experienced buyer looks for on a Khorassan rug. The pile is fine natural wool on a cotton foundation, still full and even edge to edge, and the drawing is confident curvilinear work rather than village shorthand: every vine closes, every leaf turns the way it should. It ships with a certificate of authenticity. Among 10x13 Persian rugs this is the proportion that genuinely furnishes a room, wide enough to carry a sofa group with all legs on the wool and long enough to keep a dining table centered.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 point star medallion drawn in cream and sky blue with rust points, set inside a large lobed navy cartouche that is itself filled with curling serrated leaves, boteh and small rosettes outlined in ivory. Ivory and coral pendants reach out above and below the medallion into the field, and a quatrefoil finial sits at each end on the long axis. The 4 corners carry navy spandrels with scrolling ivory vinework and a rust teardrop palmette at the heart of each. Between all of this the burgundy field is worked as a continuous all over lattice of flowering vine: open rosettes, tulip heads, split palmettes and lanceolate leaves, none of them repeating in an obvious mechanical way. The main border is navy, running a march of alternating palmettes and rosettes tied together by rust and coral tendrils, framed by ivory and terracotta guard stripes that keep the whole composition sharply contained.

A Burgundy Field Read in Navy, Coral and Sky Blue

The ground is a deep madder burgundy that reads closer to true red where the light hits the pile and drops toward wine in the shadows, which is exactly what good wool and natural dye do. Against it the navy of the medallion, spandrels and main border is almost black at a distance and opens into clear indigo up close. The lifting colors are the interesting part: salmon and coral pink through the leaves and border palmettes, a bright sky blue in the medallion petals, ivory and cream outlining nearly every motif, and small hits of terracotta rust, olive and moss green, soft gold and dark brown scattered through the vine. The ivory fringe and narrow ivory guard stripes give the burgundy a clean edge. It is a warm, saturated palette that sits comfortably on dark wood floors and takes cream, camel and deep green upholstery without a fight.

Mashad and the Khorassan Weaving Tradition

Mashad is the great city of Khorassan in northeast Persia, a pilgrimage center whose workshops have long woven for buyers who expect court style drawing: a formal medallion, a flowing vine field and a disciplined border. The local long staple wool is famous for its sheen, and it is what gives this rug its depth of color and the soft handle you can see where the pile is folded back. The best Persian Mashad rugs come out of named ateliers, and a signature woven into the border is the marker that separates a workshop commission from anonymous production. The reverse shows a tight, regular knot with the pattern reading clearly through to the back, and the 1980s dating places it in a period when Mashad output was still firmly hand-spun and traditionally dyed. If you want to understand how weavers, dealers and collectors date an oriental rug, this piece is a textbook example: signature, palette, wool and weave all agreeing with one another.