4'6" x 6'8" Persian Kashan Rug | Deep Red Kork Wool Medallion | 1970s, Like New

This is a 1970s workshop piece from central Persia, woven at 4'6" x 6'8" in fine kork wool on a cotton foundation, and it has been kept the way collectors hope to find a rug of this age: full pile, crisp drawing, tight selvages and clean cotton fringe. The scale is the reason small rooms buy it. A 5x7 sits under a coffee table, anchors a reading chair or fills the foot of a bed without swallowing the floor, and this one carries a full court medallion layout rather than the simplified drawing you usually get at this size. It ships with a certificate of authenticity confirming it as a hand-knotted Persian Kashan, along with the age and materials listed above.

Design and Motifs

The center holds an 8 lobed navy medallion built around a turquoise cartouche and a small ivory rosette, with a pendant finial at each end reaching up and down the long axis. Around it the open red field is not left bare: loose sprays of yellow and ivory blossoms, blue cypress-like leaf clusters and small rose palmettes drift out toward the 4 corners, drawn in the curvilinear Kerman-influenced manner rather than the stiff angular style of village work. The spandrels repeat the medallion vocabulary in miniature, and the main navy border runs a continuous vine of large palmettes and rosettes flanked by 2 narrow reciprocal guard stripes and a fine ivory meander. Look at the corner detail photographs and you can see the border turns resolve cleanly, which is the mark of a cartoon drawn properly rather than improvised at the end of the run.

A Deep Red Field Against Indigo, Turquoise and Green

The ground is a deep saturated red with a faint wine cast, the kind of tone that comes from good dye work on lustrous kork wool and shifts gently as you walk past it. Against that the main border is a near black indigo, so the color contrast between field and border is immediate from across a room. Inside both, the palette opens up: turquoise and mid blue in the medallion core, soft rose pink and salmon through the border flowers, olive and leaf green in the stems, warm gold and butter yellow in the blossom clusters, and clean ivory in the guard stripes and outlining. The ivory outlines matter, because they separate every motif from its neighbor and keep a busy border legible. Nothing here is chemical or harsh, and there is no abrash or fade to speak of in the field.

Kashan Weaving and the Quality of This Piece

Kashan sits in central Persia north of Isfahan and has been weaving since the Safavid court workshops, which is why its formula of a red field, a lobed navy medallion and a floral border became the reference point for the whole classical style. It is also the rug most Americans have seen without knowing it: when you watch Shark Tank there is a Persian Kashan on the floor. What separates a good example from an ordinary one is knot density and the quality of the fleece, and the folded corner photograph here shows a dense, even back with small regular knots and a firm handle. If you want the full background on the town and its weaving conventions, read our guide to Persian Kashan rugs, and if you are shopping this footprint specifically, browse the rest of our 5x7 Persian rugs to compare drawing and color side by side.