3'6" x 16'9" Persian Hamadan Runner | Wool | Brown and Rust

A hand-knotted wool runner from Persia, measuring 3'6" x 16'9". The field is a very dark ground, close to black where the pile lies away from the light, and it is covered end to end with small boteh in rust and brown. A wide rust border runs the full length on both sides. At a glance it reads as a dark corridor of pattern with a warm frame, and at nearly seventeen feet it is long enough for a hall that most rugs cannot reach.

Design

The whole field is given over to a single repeating motif: the boteh, the hooked teardrop that turns up in textiles from Kashmir to Kurdistan. Six or seven sit across the width in each row, each one outlined in ivory and filled with short hatched bars, all of them leaning the same way. Between some rows the weaver dropped in small fir or herringbone sprigs along the edge of the field, a filler that is not strictly in the scheme and makes the repeat easier to read. The main Hamadan border carries angular rosettes and serrated leaf forms on a rust ground, with narrow dark guard stripes on either side holding a running vine.

Colour

Two families do nearly all the work. The rust of the border and the boteh outlines ranges from a light terracotta to a deeper copper where the pile has worn smooth, and the inner halves of the boteh sit in a warm brown that goes almost chestnut under direct light. Against the ink-dark ground both colours gain weight, and the thin ivory outlines are what keep the rows from blurring into one another. Small touches of ochre and soft gold appear in the border rosettes, the only light notes in an otherwise deep palette.

Making

Hand-knotted in Persia with a 3/8" wool pile on a dark warp, in the Hamadan manner: a single-wefted village weave, firm in the hand, with a pile short enough that the small boteh stay crisp. The runner is in excellent condition, with even pile across its length and the border intact on both sides.