11'8" x 16'3" Persian Tabriz Rug | Sheik Safi All-Over Design | 400 KPSI Fine Wool, 1980s

At 11'8" x 16'3" this is a genuine palace piece, and the weaver drew it to be read both from the doorway and from 2 feet away. It was knotted in the 1980s on a cotton foundation with a fine wool pile at approximately 400 knots per square inch, which in Tabriz terms sits at roughly the 60 Raj level and well above ordinary workshop production. The design is the Sheik Safi layout: an ivory ground covered edge to edge in arabesque vine, held together by a small layered medallion at the center and rows of pointed cartouches, then framed by a deep burgundy main border. The pile is full, the outlines are still sharp, and the condition is perfect. It ships with a certificate of authenticity and stands with the best of our oversize Persian rugs in the 12x16 range.

Design and Motifs

The Sheik Safi pattern takes its name from the 16th century shrine rug woven for the mausoleum of Sheikh Safi al-Din, and the version here keeps the essential logic of that drawing: a continuous lattice of thin curving vine that never breaks, with every blossom set on its own stem. A compact medallion sits at the exact center, a red and green rosette inside a camel colored lobed frame with 16 pale palmette rays around it. Out from that center run 4 axes of pointed cartouches, each one filled with a tiny 4 petal rosette on ivory, dark green or wine grounds, so the field reads as an all-over design with a quiet focal point rather than a shouting medallion. On the long axis at both ends you see the vase motif, a slim navy and burgundy vessel with flowering sprays rising out of it, which is the detail collectors look for in this layout. Corner spandrels in soft camel carry paisley and palmette work. The main border alternates ivory scalloped cartouches holding star rosettes with olive green panels of split palmette, and the inner and outer guard bands repeat a small blue lotus and red flower vine on olive, so the frame has 5 distinct bands of drawing without ever crowding the field.

Color: Ivory Ground, Rust Burgundy and Olive Green

The field is a warm ivory that leans toward cream and light camel where the wool catches the light, and it is the reason this rug works in bright rooms the way darker Tabriz weaves do not. Against that ground the palette is deliberately deep: rust and brick orange in the palmettes and leaf clusters, wine burgundy in the flower heads and the main border, and a distinctive olive to moss green in the guard bands and the border panels that gives the whole rug its slightly antique cast. Navy outlines every vine and blossom, which is what keeps the drawing legible across 16 feet. Inside the small cartouches and flowers you find emerald green, sky blue, salmon pink, soft gold and a pale celadon, each used in tiny quantities, so the rug reads as ivory and red from a distance and then opens into 10 or more colors up close. Buyers searching for ivory and beige Persian rugs at palace scale rarely find one with this much color discipline in the details.

Tabriz: The Weaving Town and the Quality

Tabriz sits in the northwest of Persia and has been the country's commercial weaving capital for centuries, the place where the classical curved line was kept alive and where fineness is still measured in Raj, the number of knots per gereh of about 2.75 in across the width. 40 Raj is commercial work, 50 is fine, and around 60 Raj you reach the roughly 400 knots per square inch this rug carries, which is collector territory and exactly the density a pattern of this complexity needs. Anything coarser and the thin vine scroll turns into a smudge. The wool is a fine, slightly lustrous pile knotted on a cotton warp and weft, the back is even and tight from selvage to selvage as the folded corner photographs show, and the flat weave ends and cotton fringe are original. A rug of this size took a workshop loom with several weavers side by side and years of work from a paper cartoon, and 40 years later the pile is still full and the geometry of the borders is still square.