4'8" x 7'9" Persian Pictorial Rug | Wool and Silk on Silk | Multi-Colour

At 4'8" x 7'9", this is a pictorial rug hand-knotted in Persia, with a pile of wool and silk worked on a silk foundation. The whole field is one picture rather than a repeating pattern: six figures seated together beneath a flowering tree, seen through a pointed brick arch, against a ground of dark bottle green. Around them run ivory borders planted with flowers, irises and small birds, closed by a plain salmon outer band and an ivory fringe.

A garden gathering seen through a brick arch

The arch is drawn in pale brick, course by course, and carries a half dome tiled in brown, turquoise and white with a scalloped edge. Behind it the sky is pale blue, crossed by blossoming branches where two small birds perch. Below, on the green ground, a harpist leans over her instrument at the left, a figure in red holds a shallow cup, a lute player sits close behind, and a man in a grey robe rests a long hookah pipe across his knees; at the front two more figures reach toward a small dark flask and a blue and white vase. The terrace beneath them is a pale blue chequered floor with a footed bowl of flowers set on it, and a slender lilac column stands at each side. The spandrels above the arch are near black with turquoise palmettes and scrolling stems, flanked by grey-brown panels of carved leafwork. The main border is ivory, filled with rose and lilac flowering sprays, irises and partridges, held between narrow madder red guard stripes; at one end a cartouche carries a woven signature in Persian script between two small panels of green, white and red.

Green ground, ivory border, rose and lilac

The table records it as multi-colour, and the count is high, but the scheme is orderly. A deep bottle green holds the figures and makes the pale faces and the ivory-flowered robes read from across a room. Above the figures the green gives way to a soft sky blue, so the upper half of the field is light and the lower half dark. The border reverses that again: ivory ground, with coral and salmon pinks, lilac, yellow flower centres and dark green leaves, then madder red and aubergine in the narrow stripes, then a plain dusty salmon band at the outside. Browns and greys carry the robes and the carved side panels, keeping the brighter pinks and turquoises from crowding each other.

Wool and silk on a silk foundation

The rug is hand-knotted, rectangular, and woven at a fineness that lets the drawing hold eyelashes, individual fingers and the strings of the harp. Silk is worked through the wool pile where the detail is tightest, and those passages sit at a different angle to the light than the wool around them. The reverse, shown folded back against the tape measure, is close and even, with the picture reading as clearly from the back as from the front. The table dates it to the 2000s and records it as unused and in perfect condition, which matches the full pile and the clean, untrimmed fringe seen in the photographs, and places it among the younger hand-knotted rugs we carry. The shape is rectangular throughout, with the design drawn to be viewed from one end.