11'4" x 16'1" Persian Isfahan Rug | Red Floral Medallion | Oversize Room Size | Excellent Condition

At 11'4" x 16'1" this is a true great room piece, a Persian Isfahan woven on a cotton foundation with a 3/8" wool pile. What sells it is the drawing. A lobed ivory and indigo medallion sits dead center on a deep red field that has been filled edge to edge with rosettes, palmettes and curling vine, and the corner resolutions line up cleanly instead of being fudged the way they are on lesser workshop copies. The pile is full and even, the dyes have held their clarity, and the rug has been kept in excellent condition. Every piece leaves Freeport with a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The center medallion is built in layers: a pale celadon rosette core, a ring of apricot saz leaves and small pink blossoms, then an indigo cartouche band cut into an 8 point profile, and finally a serrated ivory outline that throws the whole shape forward off the red ground. A slender pendant drops from the top and bottom of the medallion into the field. Around it the field is a continuous all-over scroll, not a repeat: paired split-leaf arabesques, open palmettes, small carnation heads and fine tendrils that link one blossom to the next so the eye never finds a seam. The spandrels are drawn in soft pale blue-green with their own vine and rosette work, giving the medallion a framed cross shape. Three borders finish the rug, a wide indigo main band of alternating palmettes and flowering vine flanked by ivory and light blue guard stripes with a running floral meander.

Color Detail

The field is a warm tomato red, clear and slightly lighter than a Kashan crimson, which is what lets the small flowers read as individual shapes rather than dissolving into the ground. Against it the indigo of the sub-medallion and the main border supplies the dark anchor, while ivory does the outlining work throughout, on the medallion edge, the guard stripes and the leaf tips. The secondary palette is where the rug gets its life: pale celadon and sage in the spandrels and medallion core, two tones of sky blue in the blossoms, burnt apricot and rust in the feathered leaves, olive green in the stems and small touches of soft rose pink in the flower centers. Under lamplight the red deepens and the ivory takes on a cream cast; in daylight the blue-greens come forward and the rug reads cooler and more open.

Isfahan Origin and Weaving Quality

Isfahan sits in central Persia and has been a weaving capital since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. The city's reputation has never rested on wool alone but on draftsmanship, the curved line, the flowing vine, the exact repeat of a motif on the opposite side of the field, and that kind of drawing only survives at a high knot count on a tight cotton warp. You can see it on the reverse of this rug, where the knot rows are straight and closely packed and the outlines stay crisp one node wide. Weaving a design of this precision at 16 feet long is a different job again, since the cartoon has to hold true over hundreds of thousands of knots and many months on the loom. Among oversize Persian rugs, a piece this size in this condition is the one you buy for the room you never intend to redo.