11'2" x 17'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Hunting Field, Rose Medallion | Antique, Excellent Condition

This is an antique hunting rug on a full palace scale, 11'2" x 17'2" of hand-knotted wool across an ivory ground populated by lions, deer, gazelles and birds. The drawing is workshop work, curved and continuous, with a rose medallion floating at the center and deep green cornerpieces anchoring the 4 corners. Age has given the wool the low sheen and softened contrast that only decades of use produce, yet the pile still stands evenly at 3/8" and the ends and sides are sound. Very few antique room-size Persian pieces survive at this width, which is what puts it among genuine oversize Persian rugs rather than ordinary large stock. It ships with our certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is a hunting and garden scene rather than a plain repeat. A yellow lion locks with a grey boar near the top, deer graze along the flowering vines, small birds perch on blossoming stems and slender cloudband ribbons curl through the ivory ground in navy and pale pink. At the center sits a rose medallion outlined twice in green, filled with palmettes, cypress sprays and long serrated leaves, with an 8 petal rosette of grey blue and ivory at its core and a small pendant reaching toward each end. Two deep green quarter cornerpieces carry the same vine language in pink and ivory. The main border is navy with alternating palmettes and rosettes, flanked by a rose guard stripe, a sky blue floral stripe and fine yellow outlining that keeps every element separated even at 17 feet of length.

A Palette of Ivory, Green, Rose and Navy

The ground is a warm ivory that moves between cream and pale sand depending on the light, with gentle abrash visible across the open areas where the dye lots met on the loom. Against it the medallion reads as a raspberry rose, a red that has mellowed toward pink with age and carries flecks of aubergine and wine in the shading. The green is the second voice: a saturated olive emerald in the cornerpieces and medallion outline, repeated in the leaves throughout the field. Navy indigo holds the main border and reappears in the small rosette centers, while sky blue, salmon, mustard yellow, moss and soft grey fill the flower heads. The animals are woven in golden yellow, camel and taupe so they sit quietly in the ivory rather than shouting. It is a light, high-key antique palette that suits ivory, celadon, muted rose and walnut interiors.

Tabriz Weaving and the Quality of the Weave

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's design capital for centuries, the place where the curvilinear medallion and the pictorial hunting field were codified and where the Raj system of counting fineness is still used. A field of this complexity is loom work from a proper city workshop, drawn on a cartoon by a designer and knotted by a team, not improvised at the village level. The back shows a tight, regular knot over a cotton foundation, with the pattern reading almost as clearly on the reverse as on the face, and the pink selvage and ivory fringe are original. If you want to understand what tells you the age of a piece like this, our guide to how to date an antique Oriental rug walks through wool, dye and weave clues, all of which point the same direction here.