11'9" x 14'7" Persian Tabriz Rug | Signed Ivory All-Over Floral Field | Oversize Excellent Condition

This is a signed Tabriz in true palace proportions, 11'9" x 14'7" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, with an ivory field carried edge to edge by a single uninterrupted floral system. There is no central medallion, which is the harder thing to draw well: the weaver had to hold the drawing in balance across more than 170 square feet without a medallion to anchor the eye. A woven cartouche sits in the end border, and the rug has come out of storage in excellent condition with even pile and clean, straight sides. It ships with a certificate of authenticity. Buyers working at this scale usually start their search in oversize Persian rugs, where genuine hand-knotted pieces over 11 feet wide are a small fraction of what is on the market.

Design and Motifs

The field runs as a mirrored all-over composition: large fan palmettes and lobed rosettes set on a scrolling vine, with serrated saz leaves curling back on themselves, small 8 petal blossoms scattered in the open ground, and cartouche-shaped floral panels dropped in at intervals to break the rhythm. Look at the close-up and you can see how each palmette is shaded in three or four tones rather than filled flat, which is what gives the flowers volume against the pale ground. Two small birds perch in the vine near the corners. The main border repeats a turtle-and-rosette procession on salmon, framed by narrow sky blue guard stripes with a running vine, and the outer minor border steps down into a fine serrated ribbon. The 4 corners resolve cleanly, a good check on a rug this wide, and the spandrel drawing meets the border without the compression you often see when a cartoon has been stretched to fill an oversize loom.

The Ivory Field and Its Color Range

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than white, and it reads slightly differently from either end because the pile lies in one direction. Against it the palette is unusually soft for a Tabriz: dusty salmon and rose in the border and repeated inside the palmettes, sky blue and pale slate in the leaves and guard bands, deep navy for outlines and small flower centers, brick red for the strongest palmettes and rosettes, and camel, gold ochre and walnut brown through the vines and the shaded flower hearts. Small touches of white are used as highlights inside the rosettes, which lifts them off the field. The overall effect is light and airy rather than saturated, so the rug carries a large room without dominating it and sits comfortably with ivory, grey, caramel and pale blue upholstery.

Tabriz Weaving and the Signed Cartouche

Tabriz sits in northwest Persia and has been the commercial and technical heart of Persian weaving for centuries, with fineness measured in Raj, the count of knots per gereh across the width. Its workshops are the ones that took on the biggest commissions, because weaving an oversize floral field square and true demands a heavy loom, an experienced master at the cartoon and a team that stays together for the length of the project. The back, shown against the ruler, is clean and regular with a tight cotton foundation, and the drawing holds its proportions from one end of the 14'7" length to the other. The woven cartouche in the end border is the workshop's own mark, the sign of a named weaver putting his name to a piece he was willing to be judged on rather than an anonymous commercial run.