12'2" x 21'2" Antique Persian Sarouk Rug | Plum Field, Navy Floral Border | Circa 1930s

Pieces this long do not turn up often. At 12'2" x 21'2" this is a true palace-scale antique, roughly 257 square feet of hand-knotted wool woven in one piece on a single loom, and it has the settled, slightly softened surface that only 90 years of honest life can give a rug. The field is a deep plum that leans raspberry in daylight, filled edge to edge with detached floral sprays, and it is framed by a near-black indigo border that pulls the whole thing together. The pile is the soft, silky wool that makes good Persian Sarouk rugs so pleasant underfoot, and the cotton foundation, visible in the back photograph, is straight and sound. If you have been hunting through oversize Persian rugs for something with genuine age rather than a new reproduction, this is that rug. It ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, materials and handmade construction.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion here. The field uses the classic Sarouk formula of detached floral sprays, individual bouquets set at measured intervals across an open ground so the eye travels rather than settles. Look closely at the close-up photograph and you can read the vocabulary: large lobed palmettes in camel and rose, 8 petal rosettes in indigo and sky blue, serrated lancet leaves, small five petal blossoms scattered as fillers, and long curling vine tendrils in ivory that arc between the sprays and tie them loosely together. Mirrored arabesque scrolls appear in the upper and lower field, and a larger cruciform floral cluster anchors the center without ever becoming a formal medallion. The main border is broad and dark, carrying an alternating rhythm of upright flowering plants and turned palmettes worked in rose, ivory, blue and soft green against the indigo ground. It is flanked by a red minor stripe on the inside and an ivory guard stripe on the outside, the ivory band drawn with small rose flowers and diagonal leaf sprigs, and a final narrow reciprocal edge. The corners resolve cleanly, which on a 21 foot border is a real test of the weaver's cartoon work.

The Plum Field and Indigo Border

Color is the reason this rug stops people. The ground is a plum that sits between raspberry, old rose and mulberry, deeper and slightly cooler toward the ends, warmer and pinker through the middle where light catches the silky wool. That gentle variation is abrash, the natural shift between hand-dyed yarn batches, and on a field this large it keeps 257 square feet of a single color alive instead of flat. Against it the drawing is done almost entirely in blues: a near-black indigo for outlines and palmette centers, a mid navy, and a clear sky blue in the rosette petals. Ivory does the lifting, used for the vine tendrils, the guard stripe ground and the highlights inside the flower heads, and it reads bright against the plum. Warm camel and soft tobacco brown fill the larger palmettes, with touches of brick red, muted sage green and clean rose pink in the smaller blossoms. The main border reverses the scheme entirely, dark indigo carrying pink and ivory flowers, which is what gives the rug its strong framed presence from across a room. Ends finish with ivory fringe and the plum tone carries right to the selvedge.

Sarouk Weaving and the Quality of This Piece

Sarouk is a village in the Markazi province of west central Persia, north of Arak, on the old Ferahan plain that produced some of the most sought after Persian weaving of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sarouk weavers built their reputation on a heavy, tightly packed pile over a stout double-wefted cotton foundation, which is exactly why rugs from this group survive generations of furniture and foot traffic while lighter weaves give up. The floral spray field seen here is the pattern the American market fell in love with between the 1920s and the 1940s, and pieces woven at true palace scale were commissioned work, ordered for large formal rooms and woven by a team over a year or more. The back photograph shows the knotting clearly: regular, well compacted rows on a cotton warp, with the design legible from the reverse, the mark of a properly hand-knotted rug rather than a coarse commercial copy. The wool retains its natural lanolin sheen, the handle is supple, and the sides and ends are original. For anyone comparing candidates and wondering how to date an Oriental rug, the dye palette, the wear pattern and the foundation on this one all point the same direction.