12'10" x 19'5" Persian Tabriz Rug | Ivory Field, Sage Medallion | Palace Size

This is a true palace piece, 12'10" x 19'5" of hand-knotted wool on a cotton foundation, woven in the Tabriz tradition of northwest Persia. The field is ivory, quiet and warm, and the drawing across it is finer and more disciplined than the scale of the rug would lead you to expect: a single lobed medallion in sage green, four matching corner spandrels, and an unbroken lattice of scrolling vine and blossom filling everything in between. At this length it is one of the harder sizes to find in good condition, which is why it sits with our oversize Persian rugs rather than in any standard size run. The pile is full and even end to end, the ends and sides are original, and the rug ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The composition is the classic Tabriz formula handled with restraint. At center sits a lobed medallion with a small pale green inner cartouche, ringed by an ivory band of split-leaf arabesque and finished with slender pendants north and south. Four corner spandrels repeat the medallion's outline and its palette, so the eye reads the whole field as one design rather than a medallion dropped onto a background. Between them the ivory ground carries a dense curvilinear lattice of palmettes, rosettes, serrated acanthus leaves and thin scrolling vines, with large rose and camel palmettes anchoring each quarter of the field. The main border is a sage ground carrying alternating palmettes and flowering sprays, separated from the field by narrow guard stripes of running vine and small blossoms. Nothing is mirrored lazily: look at the close-up of the corner and you can see the drawing follow the curve of the border rather than break at the angle, which is the mark of a properly cartooned workshop piece at this size.

A Study in Ivory, Sage and Muted Rose

Color is the reason this rug works in a modern room. The field is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than to white, and it shifts slightly with the light because the wool takes dye unevenly in the best possible way. Over it the palette is deliberately soft: sage and olive green in the medallion, spandrels and main border; dusty rose and salmon in the larger palmettes; camel and honey in the vine work; and small, disciplined touches of slate blue and deep teal in the leaf tips and blossom centers that keep the whole thing from going flat. There is no high-contrast red or navy anywhere, which is unusual in a Tabriz of this scale and makes it far easier to live with in a large light-filled room. If a pale ground is what you are after, this sits squarely among ivory and beige Persian rugs, but with more green in it than most.

Tabriz Weaving and the Quality of This Piece

Tabriz sits in the far northwest of Persia and has been the country's most commercially serious weaving city for centuries, working from drawn cartoons with a hooked knife and measuring fineness in Raj, the number of knots across a gereh of about 2.75 inches. A rug of these dimensions is not a village project. It requires a wide loom, several weavers working shoulder to shoulder for a long stretch of time, and a designer capable of holding a curvilinear pattern true across nearly 20 feet without the medallion drifting off center or the border losing its rhythm. This one holds. The wool is firm with a clean handle, the knotting is tight enough to keep the fine vine work legible, and the cotton foundation gives the rug the weight and stability it needs to lie flat under heavy furniture. It is a formal piece built for a great room, a long dining room or a hall where floor space is the problem and a standard 9x12 simply disappears.