11'2" x 18' Persian Tabriz Rug | Reddish Pink Medallion Field | 1970s Excellent Condition

At 11'2" x 18" wide is not the number that matters here; the 18 feet of length is, and this Tabriz was drawn for a room most rugs never reach. It was hand-knotted in wool in Persia in the 1970s, kept in one home, and has come back with the drawing still sharp and the pile still even from end to end. The field is a deep reddish pink that shifts gently from dye lot to dye lot, and it carries a dark blue lobed medallion with a pale sky blue center panel, flanked by green corner fields and framed by an ivory and navy border system. Finding a 50 year old rug at this scale without thin spots or tired corners is the hard part, which is why it deserves a close look among the oversize Persian rugs we stock. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording the Tabriz origin, the hand-knotted construction and the wool pile.

Design and Motifs

The center holds a lobed dark blue medallion filled with fine ivory vine scroll and small 8 petal rosettes, and inside it sits a pale blue cartouche with mirrored curling arabesques and carnation sprays. Above and below the medallion, long cream and brown pendant palmettes reach into the field, each one carrying its own little bouquet of blue, green and wine flowerheads, exactly the kind of detail visible in the close-up photographs. The open field between them is not empty: it is filled with a loose all-over arrangement of leafy sprays, curled cloud bands and single stems, drawn in curved line rather than village angles. The 4 corners turn to a green ground with ivory spandrel panels of serrated leaves and blossoms, and the main border runs a navy ground of large paisley leaves and facing palmettes on a scrolling stem. On either side of it, cream guard stripes carry a repeating run of small diamonds, tulips and hooked leaves, closed off by a narrow burgundy selvage and ivory fringe.

A Reddish Pink Field with Green Corners and Navy Borders

The dominant color is a warm reddish pink, closer to rose than to a true red, and it moves in soft horizontal bands across the length where the weavers changed wool. Against it the medallion and the main border read as a dark ink blue that goes nearly black in low light, lifted at the center by a clear pale sky blue panel with pink outlining. The 4 corner fields are a muted sage to bottle green, cool enough to keep the pink from taking over, and the spandrels and guard borders are cream to tan with a golden apricot line separating them. Working through the motifs there are smaller notes of rust orange, olive, wine burgundy, brick red, mid blue and a dark brown black used for outlining, and each flowerhead tends to be shaded across 3 or 4 tones rather than filled flat. The pile photographs show how much of the color depth comes from that shading, and the turned corner shows the same palette carried cleanly through to the back.

Tabriz Weaving and What This Piece Tells You

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the town that revived the curved line medallion format and sent it out to the rest of the country. Persian Tabriz rugs are workshop pieces woven on a cotton foundation with the pile clipped low, and fineness there is counted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in of width. A rug 11'2" wide and 18' long could only be made on a loom set up for palace commissions, with the design cartoon drawn out in advance and several weavers working the same row, which is why the medallion lands true on the center axis and the border corners resolve properly at all 4 turns instead of being cut short. The low clipped wool and the tight cotton warp are also why a 1970s piece of this size still lies flat and still has body underfoot, and after 50 years that combination of intact drawing and honest wear is what separates a usable palace rug from a decorative one.