4'4" x 6'9" Persian Tehran Rug | Pictorial Mountain Waterfall Scenery | 1970s Wool Tableau

This is a woven picture rather than a floor pattern. The 4'4" x 6'9" field is read from one end like a painting: a stream falling out of snow ridges, a bare tree, a dark cypress, swans at the water's edge and a crane crossing a pale green sky. It was hand-knotted in wool on a cotton foundation in the 1970s, and the pile has come through in perfect condition, even and full from end to end, with tight selvages and clean original fringe. Pieces like this were woven to be looked at closely, which is why they appear as often on walls as on floors. It ships with our certificate of authenticity recording origin, materials, age and size.

Design and Motifs

The composition is built in depth rather than in repeats. At the top, jagged snow-streaked peaks rise against a soft sky, with a stand of 5 slim conifers on the right ridge and a single long-necked crane in flight trailed by 2 small birds. A pale stream drops through the middle of the ivory field and widens toward the foreground, banked by rocky shelves drawn in fine brown and black outline. On the left stands a tall bare tree with wide lateral branches, beside a smaller round-canopy tree; a dark cypress rises at dead center, the strongest vertical in the rug. At the bottom the scene closes with 2 swans, one dark-necked and one white, a butterfly above them, and a row of neatly spaced round-topped orchard trees across the lower edge. The main border reverses the effect, setting small red-roofed villas, poplar clusters and snow-tipped hills against a solid ground, with a single white mansion centered at the bottom end. Narrow ivory guard stripes carrying small rosettes and leaf sprigs keep the busy border from crowding the picture.

Ivory Ground, Teal Foliage and a Cornflower Border

The field is a warm undyed ivory, closer to bone than white, and it does most of the work: snowfields, rock faces and the bed of the stream are all drawn as shading on that single ground rather than as blocks of color. Above it the sky shifts to a dusty sage green that darkens into the distant hillside, and the water itself is a cool pale teal touched with grey. The foliage carries the strongest greens in the rug, from the deep blue-teal of the central cypress to the softer sea-green of the orchard canopies and the smoky blue of the smaller trees. Tree trunks and branches run through every value of brown, from milk coffee to near black, and the same dark brown anchors the foreground corners. Around all of it the border sits in a clear cornflower blue that reads almost enamel-like in raking light, with red and burgundy outlines framing the picture, small red roofs punctuating the border, and touches of pink and indigo in the undergrowth. The palette is quiet in the center and bright at the edges, which is exactly why the landscape stays legible from across a room.

Tehran: The Rarest of the Persian City Weaves

Tehran rugs are the scarcest city weave in Persia. The capital never ran a large commercial industry the way Tabriz or Kashan did, so what came out of its workshops was small in number and made for a demanding local clientele, usually in pictorial and finely drawn formats like this one. The hallmarks are all here: a city-standard cotton foundation and short, tightly clipped wool pile that lets the weaver hold a curved outline, shading worked through blended color rather than hard lines, and a scene planned on a full cartoon instead of assembled from memory. The wool has a low, silky sheen that comes from decades of careful storage rather than washing. A 1970s piece in this condition is unusual, and if you want to understand how weavers, dealers and collectors date an Oriental rug, the clues on this one, from the fringe and selvage finish to the dye behavior, are textbook.