11'2" x 14'6" Persian Tabriz Rug | All Over Floral Design | 1980s Signed Oversize

This is a full 11'2" x 14'6" Tabriz from the 1980s, woven in northwest Persia on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile that is still dense and even from selvage to selvage. It belongs to the small group of oversize Persian rugs that can carry a 20 foot room without a break in the drawing, and the weaver signed it with a small cartouche tucked into the ivory guard border at one end. Roughly 40 years of settling have taken the sharpest edge off the dyes without touching the wool, which still has the slight sheen you see across the field in the detail photographs. It ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field runs as a true all over floral design, staggered rows of large lobed palmettes and lotus blossoms linked by thin ivory vine scrolls that double back on themselves in tight hooks. Long serrated saz leaves cut diagonally between the blossoms, and smaller rosettes, buds and split leaves fill in every open pocket of red, so the eye never finds a resting point. The drawing mirrors precisely along the long central axis, which is the mark of a cartoon followed closely rather than a village weaver improvising. The main border is a deep navy ground carrying alternating fan palmettes and upright floral bouquets separated by thin red and green stems, fenced on both sides by ivory guard stripes of small four petal flowers. The reciprocal turn at all 4 corners is resolved cleanly, and the signature cartouche sits in the inner ivory stripe at one end, readable as a woven mark even though the script is small.

The Red, Navy and Ivory Palette

The field is a deep cherry red that leans toward crimson in daylight and warms up under lamplight, with a gentle abrash running in broad horizontal bands that tells you the wool was dyed in separate lots. Against it, the palette is unusually cool for a red rug: sea green and deep pine in the leaves, several distinct blues from pale sky through turquoise to the near black indigo of the main border, and a great deal of ivory and soft cream in the vine work, which is what keeps such a busy field legible. Salmon pink and dusty rose appear in the smaller blossoms and in the border bouquets, with touches of camel, gold and a rusty brown in the palmette centers. The ivory guard stripes and the pale sandy inner border read almost as light strips that separate the red field from the dark frame, and the effect at floor level is a rug that looks rich and saturated from across a room but reveals 8 or 9 clearly separate colors up close.

Tabriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Tabriz sits in the northwest corner of Persia and has been the commercial heart of Persian weaving for centuries, the city that supplied cartoons, master designers and trained weavers to half the country. Persian Tabriz rugs are woven on vertical looms with a hooked knife, the knots packed tight against a cotton warp, and the city grades its own work by the Raj system rather than by eye. That workshop discipline is what makes a piece this large hold its shape: the sides are straight, the ends square, and the repeat marches across 14 and a half feet without drifting. Pieces from the 1980s like this one sit in the sweet spot for buyers who want an oversize handmade rug with settled color and real wool quality but not antique pricing, and if you want to understand how weavers, dealers and appraisers place a rug in time, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same signals we used here.