4'5" x 6'7" Persian Qum Rug | Floral Bird Garden on Ivory | Fine Kork Wool, Never Used

This is a small, tightly drawn piece from one of the most demanding weaving towns in central Persia, and it has never been on a floor. The field is ivory, the drawing is a quiet garden of flowering shrubs with birds settled among the stems, and the pile is fine kork wool, which is why the surface in the close-up photographs carries a soft sheen rather than a flat matte finish. At 4'5" x 6'7" it reads as an accent or small room rug, the kind of size that collectors of Persian Qum rugs buy first because the fineness is easy to see at arm's length. The last photograph shows the back and the hand-knotted label next to a ruler, so you can count the rows yourself. Every rug we sell ships with a certificate of authenticity listing origin, materials and measurements.

Design and Motifs

There is no medallion. The field is an all-over composition of small flowering plants rising from the ground line, each one a separate little study: 5 petal blossoms, bell shaped bluebells, a central rosette with an indigo eye, carnations, forget-me-not sprays and olive brown leaf clusters. Two blue parrots face each other across the vertical axis in the upper field, and smaller songbirds are tucked between the shrubs throughout, some in flight, some perched on a stem. The main border repeats a meander of pink and rose blossoms with birds following the vine, flanked by narrow guard stripes of tiny zigzag and rosette banding. Note how the weaver kept the 4 corners resolved cleanly, which is the first place a hurried design falls apart. The drawing is curvilinear and fully articulated, with outlines a single knot wide in places, and that level of detail is only possible on a very high knot count foundation.

Color Palette: Ivory Ground With Blue, Rose and Green

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to undyed cream than to white, and it carries a faint honey cast under angled light that comes from the kork wool itself. Against it the palette is deliberately cool: cornflower and cobalt blue in the larger rose heads and the bell flowers, a deeper navy reserved for flower centers and the outer guard band and selvedge, and two separate greens, a sage grey green in the leaves and a darker bottle green in the stems. The reds run from a clear rose pink in the border blossoms to crimson and a touch of burgundy in the rosette hearts. Olive and chestnut brown fill the heavier leaf clusters and the bird bodies, and small accents of camel and soft peach keep the field from going cold. There is no color bleed anywhere in the photographs and no abrash across the field, which is typical of a carefully dyed workshop piece rather than a village weave. The ivory border and ivory field are the same tone, so the composition reads as one continuous garden.

Qum Origin and Weaving Quality

Qum, about 80 miles south of Tehran, is a comparatively young weaving center that went straight to the top of the market by refusing to compete on anything but fineness. Its workshops use only the best materials available, pure silk at the highest end and kork wool, the short soft fleece taken from the lamb's neck, shoulders and underbelly, for pieces like this one. Rivalry between the Qum ateliers is what keeps the standard high: a loom there is judged on knot count and on how cleanly a curved line is drawn, not on how fast the rug came off. This example sits in the small 5x7 Persian rug range, woven on a cotton foundation with a low, even clipped pile that shows the pattern crisply, and the back photograph confirms a tight, regular knotting with no pulls or repairs. It was woven in the 2000's and stored unused, so the wool still has its full original luster and the fringe is untouched.