11'4" x 16'10" Persian Tabriz Rug | Navy Floral Medallion | 1980s Fine Wool, Excellent Condition

This is a big, serious floor piece: 11'4" x 16'10" of hand-knotted wool woven in the Tabriz workshop tradition and kept in excellent order since the 1980s. The field is deep navy, packed edge to edge with fine floral tracery, and a soft ivory and red star medallion floats at the center without ever interrupting the flow of the vine work around it. Pieces at this scale were made for rooms that most weavers never see, and they read as a single composition rather than a repeat, which is exactly why oversize Persian rugs of this quality are hard to replace. The rug has been professionally cleaned, the pile is even, the ends and sides are sound, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and hand-knotted construction.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is classic curvilinear city work. A 16 point star medallion sits at the center, built up in concentric rings of ivory, red and light blue, with a tiny blue rosette at its core and slender pendants reaching out along the long axis. Around it the navy field carries a dense all over scheme of scrolling vines, lotus palmettes, cypress-like leaf sprays and small multi petal blossoms, with larger cream and red rosettes anchoring each quarter of the field. The 4 corner spandrels repeat the medallion's palette in a lighter key so the eye reads a medallion layout and an all over floral layout at the same time. The border system runs 3 bands deep: a broad deep red main border of alternating palmettes and flower heads, flanked by light blue guard stripes of turtle and vine, and an ivory minor band of running scrollwork just inside the navy outer edge. The corners are resolved cleanly, which on a rug this long is the mark of a cartoon followed properly from both ends.

Color: Deep Navy, Ruby Red and Ivory

The ground is a deep indigo navy that goes almost black in low light and opens up to a clear midnight blue under a lamp, which puts this piece squarely among navy blue Persian rugs that anchor a room rather than brighten it. Against that ground the weaver used a wide secondary palette: a soft powder and sky blue for the leaf work, warm ivory and beige for the vine outlines and rosette centers, a ruby to brick deep red in the medallion, spandrels and main border, and small touches of rose pink, apple green and soft gold scattered through the blossoms. The contrast is high where it matters, at the medallion and the border line, and low across the field, so the rug never looks busy from standing height. The wool has kept a clean luster, and the close-up photographs show the pink and green accents still bright with no sun fade along the edges.

Tabriz Weaving and Quality

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, working from drawn cartoons on large upright looms and measuring fineness by the Raj system, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 in. That workshop discipline is what makes a 16'10" length possible without the design drifting: the medallion lands where it should, the border turns square at all 4 corners, and the pattern stays in register from one end to the other. This example is a medium to fine weave on a cotton foundation with a wool pile clipped low enough to hold the small floral detail, which is the practical Tabriz balance between drawing and durability. Handled, it is heavy and tightly packed, the back shows crisp, even knot rows, and the selvages and fringe are original and intact. Rugs at this size are almost always commissioned pieces, and this one has the finish work to match.