11'4" x 15'9" Persian Tabriz Rug | Navy Paisley Field with Salmon Medallion | Excellent Condition

A room-filling Persian Tabriz at 11'4" x 15'9", hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation and drawn in the full workshop manner: an eight-sided navy field framed by ivory corner panels and a wide brick red floral border. This is the scale that a formal salon, a great room or a long dining room actually needs, and it sits comfortably among the best oversize Persian rugs we import. The pile is even from end to end, the colors have settled into that mellow, lived-with tone that only real wool and natural dyes reach, and the rug is ready to lay flat and use. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity confirming it is hand-knotted and Persian.

Design and Motifs

The composition is the classic Tabriz medallion and corner, but drawn with unusual generosity. A salmon cartouche medallion sits at center, its heart a cream 8 petal rosette ringed by pink and crimson blossoms, and it extends north and south into pendant finials. Around it the navy field is filled with large curling paisley boteh forms, each one outlined in ivory and packed inside with tiny roses, carnations and leaf sprays, so the field reads as a slow rotating pattern rather than a static ground. The 4 corners are cut on the diagonal in ivory and each carries a flower vase spilling blossoms, a court motif that Tabriz designers kept alive from the Safavid pattern books. The main border repeats a flowering vine with rosettes and small palmettes, held between narrow sage guard stripes that carry a running blossom chain.

Color Palette

The field is a deep indigo navy that goes nearly black in low light and opens into true blue where the sun strikes it, which makes this one of the easier navy blue Persian rugs to live with in a bright room. Against that ground the medallion glows in salmon and soft terracotta, warm enough to pull orange and copper accents out of the room. The border is a brick red that has softened toward rose, with madder-toned rosettes, sky blue and cornflower florets, and small touches of ochre and yellow gold inside the flower heads. Ivory does the structural work: it outlines every boteh, fills the 4 spandrels, and carries the vase panels. Threads of sage and olive green run through the leaves and the guard stripes, cooling the red and keeping the whole palette from tipping too warm. Rose pink and clean white highlights appear throughout the smaller blossoms.

Tabriz Origin and Weaving Quality

Tabriz sits in Azerbaijan in the northwest of Persia and has been the commercial and design capital of Persian weaving for centuries, the town that revived the court repertoire and sent it out to the rest of the country. Tabriz weavers measure fineness in Raj, the number of knots per gereh of about 2.75 in across the width, and the discipline of that system shows here in the curve of the vine, the clean diagonal where the field meets the spandrels, and the fact that a boteh at one end matches its mirror at the other across nearly 16 feet of length. Weaving on the Tabriz loom is done with a hook-ended knife, which is why the town can carry curvilinear drawing at this size without the pattern drifting. The wool is tightly packed and the back, shown with a ruler in the last photograph, reads as an even hand-knotted grid with no machine regularity.