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

A pictorial rug knotted in Persia, 3'4" x 5" on the tag and 3'4" x 5' in the measured specification, with a pile of wool and silk and a rectangular format. Rather than a repeating pattern it carries a single scene: a bearded man in a blue robe sitting on a cobbled courtyard floor with an open book in front of him, and a woman in a rose-pink gown standing behind him with a green jug raised to her shoulder. Behind them an arch opens onto a pale sky, a domed building with minarets and a flag, and a lit torch on a tall stand.

The design

The field reads as one continuous picture, with the eye led from the open book at the bottom edge, up across the cobbles to the two figures, and through the brown arch to the landscape beyond. To the left stand two large vessels, one pale blue with a banded neck and one in dark and light green with handles, and above them the torch rises against a wall drawn in small brick courses and a honeycomb panel. A hanging lamp in orange and blue swings on chains at the right, beside a niche filled with a slender cypress-like ornament. Two blue cartouches of Persian calligraphy, outlined in red, sit across the top of the scene against the apricot ground. Framing it all is a narrow ivory guard stripe of green diamonds and red dots, then a deep navy border carrying cream acanthus scrolls, eight-pointed rosettes and pink and red flowerheads.

The colour

The listing is multi-colour in the plainest sense, and the palette shifts from warm to cool across the field. The courtyard ground is apricot to soft terracotta, with the cobbles picked out in grey-lilac and mushroom, while the wall above turns to saffron and a greyed sage. Against that the woman's gown is rose pink with madder red at the bodice and a striped sash in green and orange, and the man's robe is a dusty cornflower blue that repeats in the sky. The vessels bring bottle green and celadon into the lower left, the torch flame a clear orange, and the border answers everything with near-black indigo, so that the cream vine on it reads bright at the edge and the picture sits inside it like a framed panel.

The making

The rug is hand-knotted with a wool and silk pile, the silk showing most clearly where the light catches the pink gown, the calligraphy and the flame. Fine drawing of this kind depends on small knots: the beard, the hair blown across the woman's shoulder and the ruled lines of text on the open book are all worked in a few nodes each. The table dates it to the 2000s and records it as unused, and the condition is given as perfect, with full pile and clean ivory fringes at both ends. At an accent size of 3'4" x 5' it is as often hung as laid down.