11'5" x 18'5" Antique Persian Kerman Rug | Midnight Blue All Over Floral | Oversize Palace Size

This is a genuine antique in palace proportions: 11'5" x 18'5" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, with a midnight blue field so dark it reads almost black until the light catches the flowers. Pieces at this scale were woven to order for large formal rooms, and very few survive with their drawing still this legible. The field carries an all over composition of floral sprays and curling vines in rust, salmon, old gold and sage, framed by a wide terracotta border. The pile has settled to a low, even 3/8" across most of the surface, which is exactly what a rug of this age should look like after decades of honest use. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity, and this one sits squarely in the group of oversize 12x18 Persian rugs that almost never come up in original antique condition.

Design and Motifs

There is no single central medallion dominating this field. Instead the weaver built a balanced all over garden: paired flowering sprays rising from small vases, large curled serrated leaves sweeping through the corners, and a stacked column of rosette clusters running up the center line, the largest of them an 8 petal rosette ringed with buds and leaf tips. Look closely at the close-up photograph and you can see how each blossom is outlined in a darker tone so it lifts off the dark ground, a drawing habit that separates workshop Kerman weaving from village work. The border system is a wide terracotta main band of alternating palmettes and leafy scrolls, flanked by narrow navy guard stripes and an outer row of small repeating florets. The corners resolve cleanly, which on a rug 18'5" long is a real measure of the cartoon and the weaver's discipline. If you want to understand what the drawing and the wear together say about the period, our guide on how to date an Oriental rug walks through the same signals.

Midnight Blue With Rust, Salmon and Old Gold

The field is a deep midnight blue, an indigo that has aged toward near black in the shadows and opens into a softer inky blue where the pile has worn lower. Against it the palette is warm and muted rather than bright: brick rust and terracotta in the larger palmettes, dusty salmon and rose in the smaller blossoms, old gold and wheat in the leaves and scrolling stems, sage and slate green in the foliage, and pale ivory used sparingly to pick out petal centers and outlines. The main border shifts across the length between a clay terracotta and a deeper brick red, a natural abrash from dye lot to dye lot that antique buyers look for. The guard stripes and the outer band return to the same midnight blue as the field, which pulls the whole composition together. In a room, the dark ground makes this rug read as an anchor: it grounds pale plaster walls and light upholstery, and it hides the traffic that an oversize floor takes.

Kerman Weaving in Southeastern Persia

Kerman sits in the southeast of Persia and has one of the longest unbroken city weaving traditions in the country, with a reputation built on fine drawing, soft local wool and dyers who worked a wider color range than most Persian towns. The finest export pieces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries were often sold under the trade names Lavar Kerman and Kermanshah, terms the market used for top grade Kerman weaving rather than for a different town. Rugs of this length were woven on purpose-built looms by two or three weavers working side by side from a single cartoon, which is why the pattern holds its rhythm over 18'5" without drifting. The cotton foundation is what gives an oversize piece like this its stability and lets it lie flat, while the wool pile, cut low from the start and lowered further by time, has taken on the glassy sheen that only decades of wear produce. Among oversize Persian rugs, antique Kerman examples in this size are the ones collectors wait for.