3'4" x 5'2" Persian Pictorial Rug | Wool and Silk on Silk | Multi-Colour

A 3'4" x 5'2" pictorial rug knotted in Persia, with a pile of wool and silk worked over a silk foundation. Rather than a medallion or a repeat, the field carries a single painted scene: seven figures gathered in a walled courtyard, a lantern swinging from a chain under a brick arch, and a flowering tree against water and cypresses at the top right. Seen from across a room it reads as a framed picture laid on the floor, the brown floral border doing the work of a frame.

The design

The scene is composed in depth, which is unusual in knotted work. At the left a bearded man in a blue striped robe raises a ribbed jug above his shoulder, his sash gold, his robe falling in long drawn lines to the bare feet below. Behind him a woman in rose pink stands in the archway, and a young man in a green coat sprinkled with small leaf shapes kneels at the right beside two pots and a potted plant. In the lower half a woman in pale blue trousers and tunic lifts a small cup while a man in lilac reclines against a cushion, one hand near a stringed instrument. The ground beneath them is a diamond lattice in olive on cream, dotted with red and blue, and littered with the props of the scene: a tipped green jug, a blue bowl, a slipper. The rectangular border is a continuous vine of palmettes and roses with ivory shield-shaped devices at the centres of each side.

The colour

The many colours here are held together by the cream ground of the lattice floor and the deep olive-brown of the border. Blues do most of the drawing: indigo and slate in the standing man's robe, a pale duck-egg in the tiled wall, turquoise in the water. Against them sit rose pink and salmon in the women's dress, a burnt terracotta in the arch and the lantern's glow, mustard and ochre in the brick courses, and pine green in the cypresses and the kneeling man's coat. The border adds crimson roses and small cobalt flowers on ivory scrollwork. The silk in the pile picks up light unevenly across the robes, so the blues in particular shift between dark and bright as you walk around the rug.

The making

This is a hand-knotted rug, tied in wool and silk on a silk foundation, which is what allows the fine gradations in the faces, hands and drapery: the outlines are one or two knots wide in places. The back, shown here folded over, is close and even, and the ends finish in plain ivory fringe. The table dates it to the 2000s and records it as unused, and the pile stands full with no flattening in the traffic lines, the condition given as perfect.