11'4" x 19' Persian Tabriz Rug | Antique 1900s Oversize Palace Size | Brick & Navy Floral Medallion

This is a genuine antique palace piece, woven in Tabriz in the 1900's and measuring 11'4" x 19'. The drawing is entirely curvilinear, with a lobed navy medallion floating on a soft brick field and an ocean of fine vine work filling every inch between them. The wool has taken on the low, silky patina that only a century of careful use produces, and the colors have mellowed into the muted brick, teal and rose range that collectors look for in genuinely old Tabriz weaving. Pieces of this length rarely survive in this state, and it is the kind of rug that anchors a great room, a long formal dining room or a library end to end. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity, and if you want to understand what you are looking at before you buy, our guide on how to date an oriental rug walks through the same clues we used here. Browse more oversize Persian rugs if you are working with a very large floor plan.

Design and Motifs

A large lobed medallion sits at the center, outlined in a pale teal band and filled with an 8 petal ivory rosette, curling arabesques and small bouquets of rose, olive and gold. Above and below it the same teal outline extends into a pair of cusped pendants, and 4 quarter medallions in deep navy hold the corners, so the composition reads as one continuous garden rather than a medallion dropped onto an empty ground. The brick field between these elements is filled edge to edge with slender flowering vines, split leaves, rosettes and small palmettes, all drawn in the fluid curved line that Tabriz workshops built their reputation on. The main border runs navy, carrying a procession of rose and ivory palmettes linked by scrolling stems, and it is framed by salmon guard stripes with their own small blossoms and by a fine reciprocal minor stripe along the outermost edge. Symmetry is exact along both axes, which tells you the cartoon was drawn by a professional designer and followed knot by knot across nearly 19 feet.

A Palette of Brick, Navy and Aged Teal

The field is a warm brick red that has softened toward terracotta at the surface, cooler and dustier than the hot reds of later commercial weaving, and it changes character noticeably depending on which direction you view the pile from. Against it the medallion and the borders read as a deep inky navy, close to midnight blue in the corner spandrels and the main border. The color that makes this rug is the teal: a pale, slightly greenish blue used for the medallion outline, the vine stems and the cusped pendants, which gives the whole surface its cooled, aged look. Around those three anchors the weaver worked in rose pink, ivory and cream blossoms, olive and sage foliage, camel and soft gold palmettes, with small touches of chocolate brown and a rare spark of orange in the flower heads. The guard borders shift to a warm salmon and apricot that lifts the navy away from the field, and the whole palette sits in the low, harmonious range typical of natural dyes that have had a century to settle.

Tabriz Weaving in the Early 1900s

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's most organized weaving city for centuries, the place where master designers, dyers and loom masters worked together in workshops rather than as scattered village weavers. Tabriz quality is counted in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of roughly 2.75 inches, and the discipline of that system is exactly what allows a curved vine to stay smooth across a rug this large. You can see the result in the close photographs: the stems bend without stepping, the tiny rosettes hold their round shape, and the outline of the medallion sweeps in a true arc rather than a series of angles. A rug 19 feet long also required a loom and a team most towns simply did not have, along with months of coordinated work. Wool from the surrounding Azerbaijani highlands gives the pile its density and its glow, and after more than a hundred years that wool still reflects light rather than looking dry. For anyone comparing pieces, this is what an honest antique from the city looks like, and you can see the rest of our Persian Tabriz rugs alongside it.