4' x 7'2" Persian Tabriz Rug | Wool and Silk | Ivory and Green

A 4' x 7'2" rug knotted in Persia in wool with a touch of silk through the drawing. The field is ivory, near to cream where the pile catches the light, and carries a lobed grey-brown medallion with a green centre, pendants above and below it and matching quarter medallions in the corners. The main border is a broad taupe band of rosettes and palmettes, and the whole thing reads light and busy rather than dark and heavy.

The design

The Tabriz drawing here is curvilinear and dense: thin vine stems run corner to corner across the ivory ground, carrying serrated leaves, split palmettes and small round flower heads, with cloud-band scrolls filling the space either side of the medallion. Among them are birds, paired and facing each other in places and single elsewhere, pink and pale blue with brown tails, small enough that they are easy to miss until you are standing over the rug. The medallion is outlined in dark brown and filled with its own miniature flower spray, and the corner spandrels repeat its shape. Around the field run three rectangular frames: a narrow rose-brown reciprocal stripe, a pale green guard of small palmettes, and the taupe main border with its alternating cream rosettes and rose lotus heads.

The colour

The field is a warm buttery beige rather than a chalk white, and everything else is set against it at low contrast. The medallion ground is a mushroom brown with a mauve cast, its core a soft sea green. Through the vinework there are muted blues, from a dusty slate to a lighter turquoise in the leaf tips, and flashes of rust and terracotta in the flower centres and the border palmettes. Rose pink appears in the spandrels and along the inner border, olive and sand fill the leaves, and dark brown does the outlining that holds the whole palette together.

The making

Hand-knotted, with a wool pile lifted by silk in parts of the drawing, which is why the vine lines and some of the leaf edges gleam when the rug is turned against the light. The back shows the pattern clearly and evenly, and the ends finish in plain cream fringe. The table dates it to the 2000s and records it as unused, and the pile is full and the condition perfect.