4'6" x 5'10" Persian Seneh Rug | Ivory Boteh Field | Fine Kurdish Weave

This 4'6" x 5'10" Persian Seneh is the kind of piece a dealer keeps aside. The ivory field carries hundreds of small boteh drawn in navy and madder red, set inside a notched panel and wrapped in 5 separate borders, and the whole thing is knotted on a cotton foundation with a short 3/8" wool pile that lets every outline read clean. Seneh weavers work at a scale most villages never attempt, and you can see it here in the way the tiny paisleys stay square to one another across the full width. The pile is low, the handle is thin and flexible, and the condition is excellent with no repairs or wear areas. It sits comfortably among small Persian rugs that read as art rather than filler. Every rug ships with a certificate of authenticity.

Design and Motifs

The field is an all-over boteh design, rows of leaning paisleys stacked in staggered columns from one end to the other, each one filled with dotted red and navy detail and separated by hooked stems. The corners of the field are cut back at an angle, turning the ground into a long notched panel rather than a plain rectangle, a Seneh habit that gives the composition a quiet architectural frame. Around it run 5 bands: a narrow reciprocal stripe, an ivory main border of turtle palmettes on a curling vine, a red band of rosettes and serrated leaves, a blue guard of stars and small blossoms, and an outer sawtooth stripe that finishes the edge. The drawing stays disciplined at every scale, with the palmettes in the ivory border echoing the direction of the boteh in the field.

Ivory Ground, Madder Red and Deep Indigo

The ground is a warm ivory, closer to unbleached cream than white, and it carries the whole rug because everything else is drawn against it. The paisleys are outlined in a very dark indigo that reads almost black in low light, filled and shadowed with a true madder red that turns brick in the borders and deepens to burgundy in the wide outer band. Within the border work there are cooler notes: a soft sky blue in the rosettes and palmette hearts, gold and buttery yellow in scattered flower heads, and small touches of muted green in the leaves. The selvage is finished in a rose pink wool that shows clearly along the folded corner, and the fringe is the same undyed ivory as the field. It is a red, ivory and blue palette with enough secondary color to sit against both warm wood and cool gray rooms.

Seneh and the Kurdish Weaving Tradition

Seneh, the old name for Sanandaj in Persian Kurdistan, gives its name to both a town and a knot. Weavers there built a reputation on the finest knotting in the Kurdish west, working small formats on a tightly spaced cotton warp and clipping the pile very short so the pattern stays legible at close range. The result is a rug with a thin, papery handle and a granular back, quite unlike the heavy village weaves of the surrounding region, and boteh and herati repeats are the designs the town is best known for. Quality here is judged by how small the motif can go without losing its shape, and on this piece the boteh hold their curl and their dotted centers all the way to the border, which is the benchmark a good Seneh is measured against.