13'1" x 19'5" Persian Heriz Rug | Unusual Curvilinear Floral Medallion | Navy Field, Ivory Border

Most Heriz rugs are drawn with a ruler. This one was drawn with a pen. At 13'1" x 19'5" it is a true palace piece, and instead of the blunt stepped medallion the district is known for, the weaver filled a deep indigo field with flowing vines, curled serrated leaves and hundreds of small blossoms, then set a terracotta strapwork medallion over the middle of it. The wool is heavy and lustrous, the pile stands at a full 3/8", and the drawing holds its symmetry across almost 20 feet of length, which is the hard part on a loom this wide. It belongs in the small group of oversize Persian rugs that were woven as one-off commissions rather than repeat production, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 petal rosette in aqua, rust and navy, ringed by a salmon cartouche and then by broad bands of terracotta strapwork that interlace into lobed ivory compartments, each one filled with green and coral flowerheads. Long ivory pendants run off the top and bottom of the medallion, ending in small navy palmettes. Around all of that the indigo field is packed with curving vines, paisley shaped leaves, tulip and carnation forms, and scattered ivory daisies, drawn in a curved line that owes more to the city workshops than to typical village work. The 4 corners carry rust spandrels outlined in black, each enclosing a lobed panel of navy arabesques. The main border is a wide butter ivory band alternating rust and navy shield cartouches with vase and leaf fillers, fenced by narrow rosette guard stripes on both sides and finished with hand-tied cotton fringe at each end.

A Palette of Indigo, Ivory, Rust and Olive

The field is a deep saturated indigo that reads almost midnight in low light and opens into a clear royal blue where the light hits the pile, which is exactly what good wool and a natural dye bath do together. Against it the border is a soft butter ivory, warmer than white and closer to raw silk in tone, so the two never fight. Rust carries the middle range: a brick terracotta in the medallion strapwork, a lighter salmon in the spandrels, and a true coral in the palmettes and flowerheads. Olive and sea green appear in the leaves, the small rosette centers and the tips of the vines, cooling the whole thing down, and there are flashes of pale aqua, soft pink and black outlining throughout. Seen from across a large room the rug reads as blue and ivory with a copper heart; up close it is a dozen distinct shades.

Heriz Weaving in Northwest Persia

Heriz is a group of villages east of Tabriz, sitting below Mount Sabalan in northwest Persia, and the reputation of the area rests on two things: mineral-rich water and famously tough local wool that resists crushing for generations. That toughness is why Heriz pieces survive a century of family traffic while finer rugs give out. What makes this one unusual is that the weaver took that hard-wearing village wool and a cotton foundation strong enough to carry a 19 foot warp, then worked a curvilinear master drawing on it rather than the straight-line geometry the district usually produces. Weaving a piece this wide takes several weavers seated shoulder to shoulder at the same loom for years, all reading the same cartoon, and the evenness of the selvedge, the fringe and the border repeat here shows they stayed disciplined the whole way.