4'4" x 10'5" Persian Heriz Rug | Wool | Red

A hand-knotted wool rug from Persia, measuring 4'4" x 10'5", long and narrow enough to run the length of a hall or sit beside a long dining table. Two olive medallions sit end to end on a raspberry red ground, framed by a wide border of tan and ivory panels, each panel carrying its own small rosette. From a few paces the rug reads red and green; up close it breaks into pink, salmon, ivory, pale grey and a near-black aubergine used for outlining.

The design

The Heriz drawing here is softer than the usual angular version. Each of the two medallions is a broad lobed octagon with a hooked pendant at either end, filled with curling leaves, eight-petalled rosettes and small cup-shaped blossoms rather than left open. Olive spandrels climb in from the four corners and from the long sides, so the red of the field survives only as a wide band around the medallions and a narrow waist between them, where a single small rosette marks the centre. The border is the most distinctive part: a row of square compartments, alternating tan, ivory and deep red, each holding a rosette cluster or a hexagonal boss, with a dark brown outer band of pink florets and a thin red guard stripe on the inside edge.

The colour

The field is a cool red that leans towards raspberry and carries a faint abrash across the width. Against it the medallions and spandrels are a dry olive, close to moss where the pile lies away from the light, and the two colours meet along an ivory outline that keeps them separate. Within the olive, the flowers are worked in cherry red, rose pink and salmon, with pebble grey used sparingly on leaf tips, small birds and the hexagonal centres in the border panels. The darkest tone, a brown-black aubergine, does the outlining and gives the floral work its edge.

The making

Hand-knotted in wool with a 3/8" pile on a cotton foundation, finished with plain ivory fringes at both ends, as the reverse photograph shows alongside a ruler across the knot rows. The back is clear enough to follow every motif in the border. The format is a long rectangle and the condition is excellent, with even pile across both medallions and no thinning at the ends. It is one of the hand-knotted rugs we stock in this narrow gallery proportion.