4'10" x 8' Persian Nain Rug | Ivory Vase Field, Green Panel Border | Wool & Silk, Signed

This 4'10" x 8' Nain was woven in Persia in the 2000's and has never been put down on a floor. The ivory field holds a mirrored garden of footed vases, flowering shrubs and rosette clusters, all of it drawn at a scale you usually meet on much larger workshop pieces, and the weaver closed the work with a small woven cartouche set into the border. The pile is fine wool and silk, with silk carrying the outlines and the finest stems so the drawing lifts and shifts as you walk past it, and the foundation is cotton, which is what keeps a rug this finely knotted flat and true. It ships with a certificate of authenticity recording the origin, materials and exact measurements.

Design and Motifs

There is no central medallion. Instead the field is built as a symmetrical vase garden: tall ewers and footed urns rise along the centre axis, each one sending out curling vines that end in shield shaped panels packed with 8 petal rosettes, and between them sit slender cypress-like shrubs and single carnation sprays. The 4 corners are cut with stepped, staircase edges that frame octagonal and hexagonal cartouches filled with tiny lattice and star fills, a Nain habit of putting a second, denser pattern inside the first. The main border abandons the usual running vine for a panel scheme: green edged lozenges alternate with ivory ground rectangles of 4 petal florets, each panel separated by a short arrow motif, with the signature cartouche worked discreetly into one of the ivory panels. Narrow navy and sky guard stripes of reciprocal trefoils fence the whole composition in on both sides.

Ivory Ground, Green Panels and Cool Blue Drawing

The ground is a warm ivory that reads closer to cream than white, with the natural sheen of undyed wool under it. Every line drawn on that ground is cool: indigo and midnight navy for the outlines and rosette centres, a mid sky blue for the vase bodies and vine scrolls, and a pale ice blue in silk that catches light along the stems. Green is the second colour of the rug and it is used with discipline, concentrated in the sage and deeper emerald lozenges of the panel border and in scattered leaf sprays and tulip cups in the field. Softer warm notes keep the palette from going cold: blush rose, apricot and terracotta in the corner cartouches and border grounds, cocoa brown in the taller branching stems, and pinpoints of deep garnet red in the floret centres. Seen at an angle the silk highlights turn almost platinum, while from the opposite direction the same areas sink back into the blues.

Nain, the Weaving Town and the Quality of the Weave

Nain sits on the western edge of the Dasht-e Kavir in central Persia, a town that spent centuries weaving fine wool cloth before it turned to knotting rugs in the 1930's, and it absorbed its drawing vocabulary from nearby Isfahan: curved line, flowing vine, precise repeat. That heritage is exactly what you are looking at here, because a field this crowded with vases, shrubs and lattice fills only resolves if the knot count is high enough to turn a curve without stepping it. Handle the back and the grid is even and tight from end to end, the selvages are firm, and the pile has been sheared low so the pattern stays legible. Our guide to Nain rugs explains how the town grades its weaves and why the silk outlining became its calling card. In a 4'10" x 8' format, a signed unused piece like this one is the size most buyers actually need and the hardest to find in this quality.