11'8" x 17'3" Persian Kashan Rug | Ivory & Blue Floral Medallion | Signed Oversize

At 11'8" x 17'3" this is a genuine palace piece, and it is the ivory ground that makes it unusual. Most Kashan weaving of this scale comes out of the loom on a deep red field, so a full oversize Persian Kashan rug drawn on cream, with cool blues and soft sage doing the work instead of red, is the harder one to find. The weaver signed it: a small cartouche sits in the main border at one end, which on a Kashan of this size means a workshop commission rather than a village piece. The pile is 3/8" wool on a cotton foundation, the condition is excellent, and among our oversize Persian rugs it is one of the calmest in tone. Every rug we ship carries a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The layout is the classic Kashan formula worked at full scale: a lobed central medallion with a small rosette at its heart, matching pendants above and below, and generous open spandrels filling the 4 corners of the field. What sits between them is where the drawing shows itself. The ivory ground is covered edge to edge with a continuous vine system, split palmettes, curling saz leaves and small 8 petal rosettes, all of it curvilinear, with the vines swinging out into broad cloudband scrolls that frame the medallion. The corner spandrels repeat the same vocabulary at a larger scale, so nothing in the field feels borrowed from a different cartoon. The main border carries alternating palmettes and rosettes on a camel ground, flanked by a pair of narrow floral guard stripes on each side and a fine outer minor border. At one end of that main border the signature cartouche interrupts the repeat, sitting inside a pale blue reserve, exactly where a Kashan workshop places its mark.

Ivory Ground with Blue, Sage and Camel

The field is a warm undyed ivory, closer to cream than to white, and it is left largely open so the drawing reads clearly from standing height. Blue does the structural work in 2 registers: a deep near black navy outlines every vine, leaf and palmette, while a soft powder blue fills the flower heads and scatters through the field as small blossoms. Between those 2 blues sits a quiet sage green used on the leaves, and a camel tan that carries the medallion ground, the spandrels and the main border, which is what gives the rug its overall sandy warmth rather than a cold ivory look. Accents are used sparingly and to real effect: touches of soft gold in the palmette centers, a pale rose in the medallion rosette and along the spandrel scrolls, and tiny points of red no bigger than a fingertip that pick out flower centers across the field. The finished palette is neutral enough to sit under almost any furniture and quiet enough that a room of this size does not feel dominated by the floor.

Kashan: The Weaving Town and the Quality

Kashan sits in central Persia, north of Isfahan, and its weaving tradition runs straight back to the Safavid court workshops. The town built its name on 2 things: soft lustrous local wool and a disciplined drawing style that keeps the curved line true, which is why Kashan medallions look drawn rather than approximated. This is also the rug most Americans have seen without knowing its name, because when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. Weaving a 11'8" x 17'3" piece to that standard is a different proposition from weaving a 9x12: the loom has to hold tension across 140" of width for the length of the commission, the cartoon has to stay square across 17 feet, and 2 or 3 weavers have to match hands the whole way. The back shown against the ruler tells the story of a steady, even knot count with no drift, and the 3/8" wool pile on a cotton foundation has plenty of life left in it.