3'7" x 5'6" Persian Isfahan Rug | Signed Wool & Silk Ivory Floral Medallion | 500 KPSI

Small rugs are where a workshop has nowhere to hide, and this 3'7" x 5'6" piece is a fine Persian Isfahan rug of the kind that gets bought as a keepsake rather than a floor covering. The pile is wool with silk drawn through the outlines and highlights, knotted at roughly 500 knots per square inch, which is why the curved lines stay smooth at the scale of a fingernail. At the lower end sits a woven cartouche between two flags reading "Iran Isfahan" followed by the weaver's name, the workshop's own mark on the piece. It is in perfect condition, with a full even pile and clean silk fringes, and it ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The drawing is built outward from a small navy medallion filled with an 8 petal gold rosette and a ring of lotus heads. Around it the field opens into concentric bands of palmettes, split leaves and rosettes, each band larger than the last, so the whole field reads as a set of ripples rather than a repeating grid. This is a demanding layout: every ring has to stay perfectly circular across 43 inches of width, and here it does. Gold arabesque scrollwork fills the 4 corners, flowing in wide sweeping curls that frame the field without crowding it. The main border carries alternating palmettes and cloud bands, flanked by a rose colored guard stripe of small tulip forms and a fine outer meander. Look at the border close-up and you can see the silk catching light along the petal edges, which is the detail that separates a workshop Isfahan from a village floral rug.

Ivory Ground With Blue, Rose and Gold

The field is a warm ivory, closer to cream than white, with a faint pearl sheen where the silk is used. Against it the palette is deliberately soft: powder and sky blue in the leafwork, dusty rose and salmon pink in the flower heads, sage and pine green in the small stems, and clear gold in the arabesques and the medallion center. The one strong note is the deep navy of the medallion outline and the small red accents scattered through the rosettes, which give the eye somewhere to land. The rose colored guard border and the taupe outer band pull the whole scheme together and keep it from reading as pastel. In daylight the ivory warms noticeably; under lamplight the blues cool and the gold takes over, so the rug changes character between morning and evening.

Isfahan Weaving and Quality

Isfahan sits in central Persia and has been a weaving capital since the Safavid court workshops of the 16th century. Its reputation rests entirely on drawing: the curved line, the flowing vine, the exactness of a circle, none of which works below a very high knot count. At approximately 500 knots per square inch on a silk foundation, this piece is squarely in that tradition, and the signature cartouche confirms it left a named workshop rather than an anonymous loom. In practical terms, a fine Isfahan this size is one of the most collectible things in the rug world, easy to move, easy to hang on a wall, and among the most sought after of 4x6 Persian rugs because buyers can own master workshop quality without a room sized budget.