4'2" x 5'10" Persian Sarouk Farahan Rug | Antique 1900's Navy Herati Field | Lavar Design

This is a genuine turn of the century piece, woven in the Arak district and carrying everything collectors look for in antique Persian Sarouk Farahan rugs: a dark indigo ground, a tightly drawn all over floral lattice, and a small pale medallion that reads almost like a jewel set into the field. At 4'2" x 5'10" it sits in the most useful scatter format in the house, and the drawing is fine enough that the rug holds up to close inspection from a chair or a bed. The wool has aged into the low, even, slightly glossy pile that only decades of honest handling produce, the sides and ends are sound, and the colors have settled rather than faded. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity documenting origin, age, materials and construction.

Design and Motifs

The field is a classic Herati lattice, the fish pattern, built from diamond frames enclosing rosettes and flanked by curved lancet leaves, repeated across the whole ground without a single lazy passage. Over that lattice the weaver floated a lobed central medallion with a small stepped diamond core, a pair of slender pendants top and bottom, and four large rust spandrels that turn the corners with drawn out palmette tips and fine vine work. The medallion and spandrels are not solid blocks of color, they are filled with the same rosettes and leaves as the field, which is the Farahan habit and the reason the design reads as one continuous garden rather than a shape laid on top of a pattern. The main border runs a rust ground band of alternating navy diamond cartouches and turtle palmettes, framed by sage guard stripes of paired blossoms and small barber pole cords. Look at the 4 corners and you can see the weaver resolve the border by eye, the tiny irregularities that mark a village loom rather than a copied cartoon.

A Deep Indigo Palette with Rust and Sage

The ground is a deep navy indigo that goes nearly black in the low light of the corner photographs and opens into a clear midnight blue when the pile is seen from the other direction. Against it the weaver worked a soft brick rust for the medallion outline, the spandrels and the main border, a color that has mellowed toward terracotta and salmon where the pile is lightest. The third voice is sage green, sometimes leaning teal, carried through the leaves, the guard stripes and many of the rosette centers, and it is that green that keeps the rug from reading as a plain red and blue antique. Ivory and pale gold light the medallion core, scattered blossoms and parts of the spandrel ground, while small touches of cinnamon, wine and pale peach appear in individual flower heads. The overall effect is warm and quiet, a blue rug in character with rust and green doing the work of warming it, which is why pieces like this sit easily with wood floors, leather and older furniture.

Sarouk Farahan Weaving from Central Persia

Sarouk and the neighboring Farahan plain lie in central Persia near Arak, and the weavers there built their reputation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries on a dense, tightly packed knot over a cotton foundation with wool from local flocks that takes indigo and madder beautifully. Farahan work of this period is prized for exactly what you see here, a curvilinear drawing executed at a fine enough knot count to keep the lancet leaves crisp at the scale of a 4x6, with a pile clipped short so the pattern stays legible. The wool is springy and slightly lustrous, the handle is firm, and the weave is regular enough across the width that the rug lies flat without help. If you want to understand the construction and age markers behind a piece like this, our guide on how to date an antique Oriental rug walks through the same details we used to place this one in the 1900's, and you can see the rest of our 4x6 Persian rugs alongside it.